Doug Houser:
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The addition of robotic process automation in the workplace has been a very spicy topic over the last few years. But as you might expect, there are a lot of concerns out there, especially among those in the workforce who are worried that robotics will eventually be a replacement for the hard work we humans do every day. Today on unsuitable, we are very pleased to have on Lesley Mast, a Rea principal and our project management leader, who will talk about our own efforts to implement robotic process automation. We're going to talk about what it is and what it isn't and how it can be used to drive greater levels of efficiency all the while freeing up your human workforce and taking your business to the next level. That sounds like a lot, but welcome to unsuitable, Lesley.
Lesley Mast:
Thanks for having me, Doug.
Doug:
Good to have you back on as always. So first of all, talk to me a little bit about how you became involved in this and are becoming our firm project manager and spearheading this process. Was it a passion of yours or just something you were interested in? How did you get here?
Lesley:
Sure. Well, most folks who know me know I'm pretty organized. I am a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, so I'm very interested in process. Process is very important to me, not only in my professional life but at home as well. So the concept of RPA and robotic process automation was very interesting to me as we talked about rolling this out at the firm. I was in a career transition, wanting to do something different than what I had been doing. And it just seemed to fall into place that this would make a good fit for me and for the firm. And so here we are about just a little over a year since we implemented RPA and automation to Rea.
Doug:
That's awesome.
Lesley:
So far so good.
Doug:
Yeah, that's awesome. So talk a little bit about when we hear robotic process automation, what does that mean? I mean, if I would have thought back five years ago, I wouldn't have thought that that would apply to say a business like ours, obviously, it does. So talk a little bit to our audience about what that means.
Lesley:
So robotic process automation, otherwise known as RPA, is essentially just a way to automate a task that is repetitive, often mundane, very simple in nature. So think about things that you do throughout the day that you might do on a recurring basis. Say every Monday I run the same report and I run the same formatting in this report, and then I send it out to the same people every week. Something like that is a process that can be automated. We're not talking about a physical robot. I don't have any little robots on wheels rolling around my office. It's really just-
Doug:
That'd be cool though.
Lesley:
I know. Some days those would be helpful. It's really just programming software. We have a team of five or six people here that have learned how the program, proprietary software, from a vendor that we use. We have been working on automating some of these repetitive tasks. It is kind of a scary thing for some people, Doug. Change is hard in general and then to hear, "Oh, a robot can now do your job," it's not only scary but oftentimes kind of insulting actually.
Doug:
Right.
Lesley:
We are very careful when we message about automating a process because we do care about our people. And it's not intended to replace people. It is really meant to supplement what our folks are doing. So the robot essentially is taking over the task that we're looking to automate. And so then that allows another person, the human, to spend more time on more value-added projects. They can spend time doing something fun or something more-
Doug:
Exactly.
Lesley:
... thought-provoking. So that's really what we're looking at doing here.
Doug:
I think that's a great way to look at it. Certainly, we try to espouse to our people, and we do live this, it's like, "Look, nobody wants to sit there and rotely input data as it relates to an audit or review or a tax return. If there's an RPA that can do that, you get to do the cool stuff, you know?
Lesley:
Right.
Doug:
And take a look and learn about the client's business more. That's what's fun. And try to help them grow and do all the good stuff. So, but you're right. It's not the traditional way, let's say, right?
Lesley:
Right.
Doug:
We think back and, oh gosh, well, we had to learn by doing all that stuff. Why shouldn't the next generation, so to speak? So how do you overcome some of that in not necessarily our organization, but your thoughts on how to overcome that in any organization really?
Lesley:
Well, I think just focusing on what the person will be doing instead and pointing them to the more value-added items that we can push to their plate. We want to continuously challenge our people as other organizations do as well. And it's really just to add to their job and help them to do other things. That's really what we try to focus on, is just pushing other work towards them and taking off the boring stuff. RPA is not meant to replace human intelligence. So anytime that there's any judgment or decision to be made, unless it's a very black and white, yes, no kind of decision, we still need humans involved to make those decisions and judgments. So sometimes that is a factor that is considered when we look at automating something. If there's any sense of judgment that needs to be put into the process, then it's probably... We may not be able to automate the entire thing, maybe parts of it, but we still need a human to make those judgment calls. So yeah, it's very tricky to message some of that, but I think so far we've done a pretty good job with that.
Doug:
Yeah. That's very interesting. So when I think about that judgment part of it, so how then do you decide what truly can be automated and how do you go through that evaluation and figure that out?.
Lesley:
Sure. Any more I'm of the mindset that just about anything we think of can be automated, but it's a question of whether we should automate it.
Doug:
Okay.
Lesley:
We actually have a list of six questions that we actually go through to evaluate whether something should be automated, things like what are the scenarios that the process handles? Is it a repetitive process? Can you map out the process? Can you address the decision points that need to be considered? Does the process have clear starting and ending points? And the final thing would be then, is the process performed the same way each time? The more yeses that you can get when you ask those questions, the more likely that process is to be a candidate for automation.
The other thing to consider, though, is the return on your investment, which is a very important piece of evaluating. The questions I previously asked don't have anything to do with the cost or the benefit of what you're looking to automate, but that is definitely a consideration. In our instance, we have the cost of the software to actually do the automation. And then we have our staff time to actually do the programming and monitoring of the process of the automation. So there's several cost factors that go into that. We also look at the savings, how much time can we open up by automating this? It's normally not over just a one-year period. It's we know we're going to be at a loss this first year because it just takes time to automate it, so we're going to lose this first year, but going forward then, how fast can we make our money back and make that a profitable automation?
And so far from the analysis that we've done with the processes that we've done, we should be profitable on almost all of them in year two. For us, it's been a pretty quick turnaround. That tells me that it's working and that we've proved the concept.
Doug:
Yeah, that's awesome. Give us a couple examples of some of the things that we've automated. I know I hear this term in some of our management meetings or whatever, "We're going to deploy a new bot." I'm always like, "Wait, what does that mean?" It sounds scary, but it really is pretty cool. So maybe talk-
Lesley:
It is.
Doug:
... about a few examples.
Lesley:
One example, I touched briefly on it before as I was talking about an example of what can be done, Elaine, someone in our Rea Corporate Partners Group runs a report every Monday for particular lists of people. She has now automated that process. So it's a report, it has very specific parameters, it goes to very specific people. The robot now runs that report every week for her and emails it out at the same time every Monday morning, whether she's here or not, which is another great benefit of automating some of this because robots don't take time off, unless they happen to be broken, which does happen occasionally. But they don't need bathroom breaks. They don't need vacation. They don't need to sleep so they can work whenever we need them to, which is a really great benefit. So running that report and emailing it out, that's one example.
Another example is our Government Assurance team needs to access a government website on nearly every job that they do where they have to select from a group of reports that they need for their audit. So we designed an Excel sheet with all those reports listed. The auditor goes in, says yes or no that they need those specific reports. They drop the Excel file into a specific folder. The robot recognizes that a file's been put into that folder. The robot logs into a website, downloads all those required folders for that client, and then saves them to a folder for the auditors to access and to use in their audit work. So, yeah, so something-
Doug:
That's cool.
Lesley:
... that would take maybe a half hour or something for our assurance team to do literally now takes not even five minutes to get done. So it's a real savings in that same point.
Doug:
When you multiply it over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds upon hundreds of occurrences over, like you said, multiple years, that's pretty cool.
Lesley:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Doug:
How do you as the firm leader... Obviously, you get ideas brought to you. So how do you scrub those ideas or screen those ideas in terms of, "Okay, this makes sense," or "Boy, this is just Doug's wild ass request that makes no sense whatsoever."? So how do you scrub all those and determine, "Hey, these are the best."
Lesley:
Well, that's a great question. We do go through the process of asking those six questions that I mentioned before, to start with that. Because you're right, people present all sorts of ideas and some of them just aren't reasonable for whatever reason. We go through that process,. We look at the ROI as to how fast we think we can get paid back. And then oftentimes I'll meet with the person who suggested it and just have them walk me through the process to understand what's currently being done, what software is in place for that process, who's involved, how much time they take to do that process, how many times a week do they have to do it. Obviously, the more times it's being done, that does help our ROI and capacity creation. So we do want to ask those kind of questions and vet out what we think will be a positive automation for us.
And it's not always black and white. Sometimes we don't know until we try and run into a roadblock. But fortunately, our vendor is very good at customer service and can help us through tough times or programming issues that we run into. Right now, so far, we haven't been real picky. We're just trying things out to see how things work, but there will come a time where we're a little bit more selective as to what we look at.
Doug:
So beginning to end, say, for a couple of those examples that you mentioned, how long does it take to, "Okay, here's the thought of what we want to implement," and to get it to where it can actually run? How long does that typically take?
Lesley:
Well, that's a hard question to answer, Doug, because it really depends on the process.
Doug:
Okay.
Lesley:
So the process that I mentioned earlier where Elaine's running that report, the first report that she automated probably took, let's say, six to eight hours. But the second one takes really not much time at all because she can use a lot of the same steps and maybe tweak different things from the first one. So she's able to replicate that and make that process better for the second and the third report. But I would say also we've had one of our biggest projects right now where we have the robotics taking care of our e-filing forms that come back from clients when they're signed. That has taken literally hundreds of hours to put together because the process is complex. We have four different developers working on it. We have, I would say, 10 different robots doing different things. So it really depends. The more complex, the longer time it's going to take. And it takes time to test it, to make sure things are working well. Even if you get all the information from the end-user, you have to make sure that the robots are doing what they're supposed to be doing when they're supposed to be doing it and giving the output that we're expecting. So there's an extensive training... I'm sorry, testing process that happens after it's developed and actually functioning. So it can vary very widely depending on the process.
Doug:
And I can see how something like that that you mentioned with the signatures and that, obviously. But if you can get it to function, it's massively valuable-
Lesley:
Absolutely.
Doug:
... because think of how many obviously tax returns that we process each year, right?
Lesley:
Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's why we wanted to tackle that process early because we knew that even though it was going to be difficult, it was going to pay us back very quickly once we got things working. So we've run that out as a pilot group right now with four different offices, and we should be running every office on it by January. So this busy season will be much different for some of our administrative folks as we start to work with the robots and the process that they're used to. But like you said, it's going to open up thousands of hours of capacity for that team too. So it's going to be really exciting for them to spend some time on other not so mundane things.
Doug:
Yeah, that is really cool. So if I'm a business owner out there, what should I be thinking about in terms of next steps? If I'm listening to you, I can already think of dozens of things in my business, say right, that "Man, that would be really cool if I could automate that." So how do they start? What's the approach?
Lesley:
Yeah. A couple of things to think about. One, do you have in-house expertise already? It depends on if you have internal IT department or maybe you consult with somebody for IT help. Depending on that answer, that would give us some indication as to whether you could proceed on your own or not. If you have somebody who has programming experience in-house, that is a necessary because somebody has to write the code within the program to be able to automate the robot. You also need to consider your budget. Right now, there's a lot of vendors out there who can offer you free options. And you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the software, so you really have to consider what your budget is, what kind of projects you have. Is this a short-term thing, a flavor of the month kind of thing, or is it a long-term investment for the entity? Those are things to consider.
Also, we've found that it pays to talk to your existing software vendors to see if they have any automations or what they call APIs that you can use to tie programs together. So those are some resources that might be already available to you to ask about. You'll still need that programmer available to deal with that, but that would be another question I would ask. Maybe the last thing would be is whether the process is a good process already. Is it efficient? Consider maybe doing a Lean-
Doug:
Okay.
Lesley:
... Six Sigma project on that process to make sure it's running in the best way possible. Those would be things that I would be considering as I would be considering going forward with automation.
Doug:
Very cool. Very cool. So, all right, one last question, so how do you implement this in your personal life at home? Have you perfected that yet? Do you have any tips that's on that front?Because I could use them, and I'm sure many others could too.
Lesley:
Yeah, there are a lot of household duties I'm sure that I'd like to outsource to robots, but we haven't gotten that far yet.
Doug:
Yeah, I missed that boat since my three daughters are raised and gone.
Lesley:
They you go, yeah.
Doug:
I'm sure there were things we could have done more efficiently.
Lesley:
Yeah.
Doug:
That's all part of the fun, however. All right, well, great. Well, thanks so much, Lesley. This is a fascinating topic and I'm sure we'll have you back on to talk further as it continues to evolve and we do more. Obviously, it's certainly germane to a lot of what's going on out there, so cool stuff. Thanks again.
Lesley:
Yep. Thank you, Doug.
Doug:
And if you want more business tips and insight, or to hear previous episodes of unsuitable, visit our podcast page at www.reacpa.com/podcast. And while you're there, sign up for exclusive content and show notes. Thanks for listening to this week's show. Be sure to subscribe to unsuitable on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, or wherever you're listening to us right now, including YouTube. I'm Doug. Join us next week for another unsuitable interview from an industry professional.
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