Where does most of the maintenance of the RPA come from? Is it UI changes, edge cases in state (e.g. need to re-login), or other things?
A month ago it was a change to the invoices from a specific company.
Every week it’s the business noticing an edge case, or something that could be better. We pile these up, but you’ll rarely have a RPA process that handles 100% so there is an never ending race to get closer and closer. ;)
In one of our processes that handles a major process related to payment, we were able to automate the work of two financial workers, but the cost was that it required a new RPA worker to handle the errors, and a RPA worker is more expensive than two financial workers. It was still a gain, because the RPA worker also does other RPA things, but it’s a good illustration of how terrible RPA is at automation compared to the other tools in the toolbox.
How do you test RPA bots - just wait for them to break?
If you're interested, it'd be great to hear more about what you think of other tools in the toolbox. Email is on my profile.
If you are integrating using something like Sikuli, which works by actually looking at the screen pixels (rather than DOM elements, which are an implementation detail), you can use 'smart' techniques like OCR and synonym lists to make a change resistant client.