As a Program Manager on an Oracle Cloud project, I was going through the upcoming patch testing plan with my project Steering Committee when one of the senior business leads interrupted me with this question “Do we have to keep doing this every quarter?” I felt like I was boxed into a corner.
Fortunately for me over 2 decades of experience as a senior management consultant had prepared me for situations like this. “Yes, we do!” I retorted confidently and continued to say “We need to ensure that none of our critical business processes are broken by the upgrade patch and we don’t encounter any business continuity issues.”
“Well, you better find me an automated solution or budget to hire additional staff” said the concerned business lead. The other business leads quickly nodded in concurrence.
…repeatable, well-defined, rule-based tasks ideally suited for an RPA implementation.
Over the next few days I found myself dwelling over the question posed to me at the Steering Committee meeting by the senior business lead “Do we have to keep doing this every quarter?” I started thinking of on-premise automated testing solutions I had used in the past. But our environment was much more complex and Oracle cloud product operations were quite different from the on-premise operations I worked on in the past. Over the next few days I went through a variety of forums and found that several other companies also faced a similar dilemma.
That’s when my thoughts went towards Robotic Process Automation. I started wondering “could a well-developed RPA solution solve this challenge that many organizations will face when dealing with cloud-based applications that need to be tested periodically?” Testing, data interchange and application integrations were in most cases repeatable, well-defined, rule-based tasks ideally suited for an RPA implementation.
…your payroll manager is processing a biweekly payroll run and the application fails.
As the adoption of SaaS applications increase the enterprise cloud software vendors, are now in a better position to roll out new features and functionalities on their multi-tenant SaaS cloud platforms. While the cloud vendors will do the technical and functionality testing of their newer versions, no vendor can realistically test every business scenario that each client has. Imagine the different setups and varied process configurations. Thus, the onus squarely falls on the customers of these SaaS applications to ensure that their critical processes are well tested.Imagine this scenario, “your technology department has just patched in the latest upgrade for your SaaS application and your payroll manager is processing a biweekly payroll run and the application fails.”
Over the years RPA-based automated application testing solutions have evolved and become quite sophisticated. The software bot can go through applications screens based on custom, predefined test cases and scenarios to do exhaustive functionality testing while capturing failures and exceptions. The bots have capabilities to screenshot success and failure scenarios, to have ensure audit compliance and regulatory requirements. The key business users no longer have to be saddled with testing that took up so much of their time. They can now focus on their individual business activities.
Could this be the impetus needed to move organizations towards automation?
Data interchanges and application integrations is another area where RPA could make a significant impact. Most companies have legacy systems that are outdated and are expensive to maintain. These legacy systems have interfaces to other applications that IT departments and business units are reluctant to touch. This keeps the customers locked on these outdated applications. These systems could prove to be a major hurdle in executing the organization’s vision in terms of adopting technology for competitive advantage and efficiency. RPA solutions can form the digital workforce need to extract data from one system and enter into another system without a need for developing and maintaining costly interfaces.
The current global lockdowns and physical distancing due to the COVID-19 situation has put an additional strain on human resources availability and accessibility in organizations. Could this be the impetus needed to move organizations towards automation? It will be interesting to see how companies adopt RPA as a solution for application testing and interchange of data besides the core functionality of business process automation.