Trust the Process (Automation)

 By Dan Cooper

"Trust the process!" We tend to associate that mantra with the sports or motivational-speaking worlds -- mainly as a call to encourage teammates, customers, supporters -- people -- to have faith.  However, we seldom hear it in our dailies.  We don't (usually) celebrate the mundane tasks we automate, like setting the coffee maker to auto-brew while we sleep or leaving the roomba alone at home with the family pet to keep the floors clean (cat memes and viral fails notwithstanding).  That said, those simple things we take for granted are the core of automation: repeatable tasks that offer little value in being performed manually on a long-term basis.

Flashing forward, most are aware we are firmly entrenched in the world of "bots."  There's unquestionably a negative connotation associated with the term "bot' -- particularly in the social media context.  That aside, there's a hot and growing market for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). As a recap/primer, RPA is software that allows a user to create a low- or no-code script that will automatically execute repeatable tasks – sometimes simply by recording a sequence of mouse-clicks that can be scheduled or replayed later with the push of a button.

Gartner has been trumpeting the rise of RPA for many years now.  In fact, it predicts over 90% of large companies will have adopted some form of RPA by this year.  The long, continuous dissolution of large IT departments coupled with the current heavyweight champion of culprit factors, COVID-19 -- have been the primary drivers of the explosion in the RPA/AI) market, according to the research firm.  It has experienced double-digit growth annually since 2019 and shows no signs of slowing down over the next few years.

There are many players in the RPA vendor arena -- UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, -- with many more flooding in as we speak.  And for those many Microsoft PC users who have recently upgraded to Windows 11 -- you probably have noticed Power Automate is now part of the platform even though you didn't necessarily ask for it  -- that's no accident.

I won't get into the myriad of ways in which RPA can be leveraged.  Rather, I wanted to talk about ways I think this exciting technology can apply in the Connected Planning sphere.  For example, a conundrum I see quite often in Anaplan integrations is one where a source system either lacks an API or is difficult and/or expensive to tap into.  This typically involves a legacy system or highly-customized on prem application.  Until an API can be developed -- or software with a supported native connector can be procured -- the customer is often faced with the unenviable task of manual ETL (think screen-scraping data, for example). This is just one area where RPA can be a very useful stopgap, as well as a bridge into a longer-term adoption of hyperautomation.  And it's also just the tip of the iceberg.

In fact, one of my colleagues -- Allitix' resident efficiency connoisseur Todd Galuska -- recently posted about this very topic on LinkedIn.  In his video, Todd talks about some art-of-the possible ways to leverage RPA with Anaplan as well show a brief demonstration using an attended Power Automate bot with Anaplan.

Look for upcoming discussions from us on this topic, with deeper dives into RPA as well as all things Anaplan automation.  Email us at all-in@allitix.com for more information.