TLDR: No! That’s not what we’re here for. Robotic process automation is here to help you.
We often get called in to help a company automate a process. Many times this involves automating something that an end-user does. To make macros that make their job easier, less painful, and make them more productive.
Initial Resistance to Change
Sometimes, at the outset, we (or the IT department proposing Macro Scheduler as a solution) detect a little resistance from the end user. If not properly briefed they may be concerned that what we want to do is take work away from them, and they may be concerned that the macros, or software robots, are about to take their jobs away.
Epiphany!
Nothing could be further from the truth and by the time we’re done, the end users love us to bits and usually give us a long list of other things they’d like us to automate! Often they discover how easy it is to do it themselves with tools like the Macro Recorder and other code wizards.
I’ve written thousands of macros for hundreds of companies. I’ve never worked on anything that was designed to take a job away from an employee, other than one the employee didn’t like doing and didn’t have time to do without it impacting on their core purpose. In every case the macros we wrote were there to make the employees’ jobs easier, or to allow them to be more productive in more important areas. For example: removing a tedious admin task from an already overstretched clinician, allowing them to see more patients.
I suppose you could argue that the many over-night data-entry style macros we’ve written could have been done instead by a team of data entry personnel. But such a team didn’t exist to start with, or would have been cost prohibitive, or too error-prone to be considered in the first place.
Improving Productivity
So to answer the question, no, I don’t believe robotic process automation is about taking jobs away. It’s not about replacing staff. In my 21 years of automating user interfaces this isn’t what I’ve seen. Instead, I’ve been rewarded with making people’s lives easier, removing cumbersome, painful, processes, or using macros to simplify and improve an existing process.
