Many who work in the automation sector focus on RPA. Given a set of rules, the robot can carry out the tasks a human might do manually with a mouse and keyboard in a fraction of the time, freeing the human worker up to focus their energy elsewhere. But what’s it like working in the area of RPA? Here is a digest of the interview with Allison Rose Barry who has joined Deloitte in 2019 as an RPA developer. She talks about her job and the role automation has played during the pandemic.
What are some of the most exciting automation projects you have worked on?
When the pandemic hit last year, I got the opportunity to work on automation needed urgently for a public sector client. Before we came in, the client had a significant number of highly qualified employees redeployed from their full-time positions to enter, monitor, and track virus-related data onto their IT systems. This was a massive drain on resources and the volume of data and tedious nature of the administrative work was overwhelming. Within two months, our team reduced the admin burden to complete these tasks by 87%.
At the peak of the pandemic, the bots reduced the admin burden by 43 hours for every 100 positive Covid cases. I was closely involved with scaling this automation up in response to spikes in demand/positive cases. I worked with the team to configure a virtual workforce (what we call a ‘high-density robot’) to scale our automation to deal with the significant spike in positive case reporting.
The employees that were previously redeployed to do this work were given the time back to use their expertise and qualifications in the national response to Covid-19. Using automation has meant that our client avoided having to assign key staff members to manual, labor-intensive transcribing, transferring, and entering data into IT systems for many months.
Can you describe a typical day for you?
Every day varies, but as a developer, I’d typically spend up to four hours a day building and testing automation or monitoring a bot running in production. I work closely with the business analyst on my team in documenting processes we’re automating, quantifying, and analyzing the benefits of automations in production and solving problems or implementing changes in the code if requested by stakeholders.
My day-to-day role also involves collaboration with business users and process owners when gathering requirements for a build, answering technical queries, evaluating change requests, or handing a solution over for their management. On the wider team within Deloitte, myself and other colleagues are responsible for publishing a monthly newsletter where we keep the team up to date on news about emerging RPA technologies, vendors, case studies, and general industry performance. It’s a good outlet to foster a sense of community within the team and to gain more insight into the impact RPA is having on industries everywhere.
You can find more answers from the interview on the source page.
