GA 479 | Continuous Improvement and RPA with Jacob Bonde Larsen

But it's not really thought into how you want to run your business. And I believe that if you really want to be successful with rpa, then you actually have to think it into this is how you run your business. It's actually operational strategy rather than some sort of initiative.

Today I'm excited to welcome Jakob Bande Larsen to this show. Now Jakob is from Denmark and he's got a really strong continuous improvement background, but today he's speaking specializes in the world of RPA or robotic process automation. Now this is a topic we've talked a little bit about on the show over the last few years, but not a lot. And there's a lot of parallels between RPA and just general continuous improvement or lean. And so today we really dig into what is this RPA all about. There's a lot of talk about robots taking over the world and all this kind of stuff. And especially with this, all the AI stuff going on around us, you know, every day something changing in the AI world. So are there going to be any jobs left for people? And in fact I asked Jakob that exact question pretty early on in the show, so I thought he had a really nice response to that. So I do think there's lots of parallels between the things that RPA is trying to accomplish and what we as lean thinkers are trying to accomplish. Namely, we're trying to, you know, elevate the work of people to, you know, reduce the struggle, if you will, and allow the folks to, who that are that are here working to do higher level work and do even more of it. So I don't think there's any fear, at least in my opinion of these things like wiping out all of the jobs of the world because, well, people are going to be needed to do other stuff. And so I think that's, that's the lesson that I'm taking at least. Anyhow, show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode four. 79 again gembapodcast.com, look for episode four. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Jakob, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm thanks. Very happy to be here.

Yeah. Did I, did I do okay on your name?

Yeah, it's perfectly fine. You can call me Jacob.

Jacob, as we would say in America. But Jakob. Yes. That's super cool, man. I have actually two Jacobs in my family, nephews. But you're the first Jakob that I've met. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So where are you from?

I'm In Denmark. So I'm out of Denmark right now. I'm in a small town called. Called Hammel, which is where I live.

Okay, very good, Very good. All right. I love it. All right, well, hey, man, I'm excited to have you onto the show to talk a little rpa. I think it's going to be fun to. For the. Our pretty hardcore Lean folks to. To hear about RPA and how. How it plays together nicely. So I know you've listened to the show, Jacob, and we do get things started with our guests sharing the quote. So what do you have?

Yeah, I mean, not. Not necessarily this is going to be a lot about Lean, but. But still, I did pick up something from a Lean book. The book called this is Lean by and Pierre. And basically they say, in brief, Lean is an operational strategy that prioritize flow efficiency or resource efficiency. And I mean, it's not really to talk about flow efficiency or resource efficiency, because I'm sure that you guys have talked a lot about that in your shows. What I find interesting in this quote is actually the term operational strategy, because, I mean, at least when I've been reading Lean books, et cetera, et cetera, I so often find that if I read something from Japan, it always seems like it's like coming through the line, organization, sort of implementing Lean. And what I've been used to in Western companies, you know, more or less every place I work is that Lean is more always coming, like through a staff function and sort of more like, I'd say, and, you know, maybe a strategic initiative rather than an operational strategy. And I think there's a very distinct difference between these two. And of course, the reason I also want to bring it up is because I sort of feel I see the same. When we start talking about RPA and implementing it, I often see that it's more taken as like, initiative or maybe a strategic initiative, but it's not really thought into. How do you want to run your business? And I believe that if you really want to be successful with rpa, then you actually have to think it into this is how you run your business. It's actually an operational strategy rather than some sort of initiative, if that makes any sense.

Got it, got it. No, it does. Okay, good stuff. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about. About. About yourself, about your background and how you got into this line of work and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, but, yeah, basically, I mean, I'm a chemist from back when my first job was in some chemical, which is Actually a US based company, but I was working here in Denmark. I'd only been there for like half a year or so before I turned into a Six Sigma green belt. And within a year or so I did the black belt and started doing some projects first in Europe and later on in us. I was there for a total of five years. Then I came to Vestas, which is a wind turbine manufacturer in Denmark. Yeah, great, great company in my opinion. And making wind turbines is a great, great effort. Nice. Been some years in first APM terminals, container terminal operations. I've been in a company called Yellowin that make windows and doors.

Know them very well.

Yeah, yeah, I know, yeah, I've heard them a couple of times on your shows. So I know you know them, but in the northern region or northern European region. Okay, so you, I'm presum you talk to the US based guys and yeah, then I've been in a company called Twilum, which probably later on I think if I bring some stories, example, I most likely actually be bringing them from Twilum, which is a Danish based company that's producing furniture. It's more or less furniture like, like Ikea. And that's actually the first time I started picking up rpa. Until then then I have been doing a CI or quality work, my career. And yeah, for last more or less half a year, a little bit more, I've been working in a consultancy company called the Nordic rpa. Okay, so that's good.

All right, well, let's jump in. So rpa, you've mentioned it a few times. What's it stand for and what is it?

Yeah, it's, I mean it stands for Robotic Process Automation. And I mean to me I normally say it's about two things. The first thing that I'd say the sort of the distinction in RPA is that it can actually emulate what you're doing on the screen. Right. So if you take a computer can, yeah. Pick out stuff that you do. It can write in cells, it can read from a, you know, email or website or whatever. It can basically do everything that a human being can do in a screen. It can use all kind of applications and you know, it can move the mouse, it can use the keyboard. Yeah. Read, write, et cetera, et cetera. So it can more or less do everything that a human being can do on a computer. And then of course you can put logic into it because you can program it so just like any other program. And then I think where it has like a strength that also is actually compared to human is that it can of course, act like a computer, meaning that it can also directly access databases or use APIs. All these smart features that actually sometimes may just make it be much more efficient than a human being. Because you can make a process that a human is, is doing in a sort of clumsy way, actually make that, I'd say, much more lean.

So can you give us maybe one example?

So one example is, is for instance, like, yeah, process I've done a lot. It's like sales orders.

Sales orders. Okay. Yeah.

You know, you have, you have people, at least in some cases, you have people sitting there with a, with a sales order coming in in the email. It's probably a PDF file attached in the email, right? They'll go, you open the email, they open the PDF, they read, okay, this company needs these lines. And then they'll go into the AP system, start typing, you know, what's all the lines, of course, who's the customer? And et cetera, et cetera. And then, yeah, it takes a couple of minutes. But you can also actually make a robot do that. You can make a robot go find the email, it can read the PDF, it can take everything off it. It can do some validation checks in UAP system to make sure that the order is valid, and then it can put into the EAP system. So basically you can take a process. So if I just go back to this resource and, and flow efficiency, right? I mean, of course it can be much more resource efficient, which is typically what people think about when doing robotics, but it's actually also much more flow efficient because, I mean, the robot never sleeps, right? I mean, typically people, they will, you know, have piles on the desk or in the email or whatever, or do it every morning or do it every afternoon or maybe a couple of times a day. But you can make the robot run much more often. So you can actually get a much better flow in all this. I call it the critical information flow. So you can speed it up a lot, actually, because you can have robots be, let's say, much more busy. Just, you know, do it much more frequent than what people would do.

So somebody's listening to this right now. They're like, oh, wonderful, there goes my job. Right? Coming from my job. Like, what, what's your, what's your response to that?

I, I think to me it's probably like a yes or no, because I think it's the same when you do lean, right? I mean, you also try to make things more efficient and it's like short term. Yes, maybe Some jobs will change, right? Long term will just be more efficient and be richer and do other stuff. So I think it's no different than doing lean, right. I mean, if you, if you get people and they have to do something else, I mean, then you just find more value added activities for them. I'd say when I have been doing this, I mean, people have always actually been very happy for the robots and it's really because the jobs that the robot typically take is the most boring stuff. Yeah, robot is very good at stuff that's repetitive and kind of boring to people. It doesn't require thinking. It just typically retired, you know, typing, typing, typing, doing the same again. Again, again. So actually, I mean, when I would work with people and they say actually enjoy robots a lot because it just takes all the, I'd say garbage out of the work and just makes it much more fun. Interesting. So. So yeah, at least I have not really faced any issues with it at all so far.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so you've talked a little bit already about RPA and but like if you were to think about just the whole idea of continuous improvement, whether it's lean, six sigma, just do it, just trying to genuinely make things better and rpa, how would you say they're similar?

I think there's actually to me a lot of similarities and I think maybe it's easier to pick up an example than this. When I started RPA, it was like let's say just beginning of 19 and then we had some visitors from our US office. We had a sales office in Chicago and they were struggling a lot. They were just super busy. They were being bogged down by all kinds of processes they had to maintain. It's an office that was doing E commerce. So after a couple of months I went there and I spent a week with them. I think we could more or less call like a Kaizen event. Right. So I went there and you know, observed and talked and we chatted. Right. We even built a robot while being there. And we also identified like I think 12 robots that I could build when coming home. And I mean the effort we did there was, I'd say it really made that office very happy. It was great for me. It was great for them. I mean, normally. So when they came to, you could say the Cyber weekend, you know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I mean they'd always be like just, you know, hurting and you know, having like after that one week where they just had to, you know, have temps or be completely bogged down in work Trying to get all the orders in and send all the tracking information and everything. But after we did this effort and build robots, then they could actually finish all the work that they had during those days. No rush required, more or less, because the robots was just doing all this busy work for them. And I think you say, for me, I mean, I felt I was just doing CI work. My tool was just to use a robot to do the fixes. But I mean, it was mapping, it was identifying needs, it was identifying functionality. I mean, to me, no different than doing, you know, normal CI work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Human tool was just a robot.

So you. You keep saying robot. So, like, sometimes when I hear the word robot, I think of some robot sitting there moving around a factory. I assume it's largely programming and different things like that. Talk about, what does a RPA robot look like?

Yeah, I mean, of course, I mean, you'll make funny little icons of them, right? And you can make nice little pictures of them. But yes, of course, it is really just a computer program, Right. I think normally you could say that RPA in BASIC consists of three key elements. The first is like a program that allows you to build a robot. It's more like, I don't know if you've ever done a macro in Excel. Yeah, right. But it's not really different than opening, like, let's say, the macro functionality of Excel. I mean, of course, it's slightly different building a robot. It's not really more difficult. It's probably a little easier, actually. But so, so you have a place where you build your robot, right? And then, of course, when you build it, you have to be able to run it. So you can also, you know, start the robot or start your program, right? So you have a place you build. You have a bot, you would call it, right, To. To actually execute your robot. And the bot can be, you know, one that you say, okay, now run, and you run on my screen. Or it can also be one that is just on, let's say, a remote server. And then you say it should run at this point in time. And that more or less leads us to the third element, which is what I would call an orchestrator, which is like, yeah, the place where you go and say, when should all your different robots run or what should trigger them? And also you say, where you can go and say, okay, now this is happening, right?

Yeah.

So the three elements, right, Is one, a software to program an execution unit, that's a bot. And then this, you can say overview control unit that. That's the orchestrator that allows you to, to start and stop robots and install them and say, you know, you run every hour, you run tomorrow at 11 and et cetera, et cetera.

So I mean we're recording this here in the middle part of 2023 and I feel like every, every day something new is coming on in this AI world of ours. So where do you see things like Chat gbt Bard, whatever. These, these various tools that are available right now and like I said, new ones are appearing daily hourly. Really? As far as RPA and, and say chat GBT, can I ask ChatGPT to, to create a robot for me and will it?

I think you can be pretty close. I mean you say it's. It's not that often nowadays that I actually build robots, but it's often that consultants in our company actually use ChatGPT to, to help build some of the code, I guess with encoding, right. That you have a CHAT GPT help you. You can also incorporate CHAT GPT and right in, in your robots if you want, right. I mean some use cases I know that pin up like Chat GBC is, right? If you, let's say that you, you go on trustpilot or whatever and you want to see, you know, the, the reviews you're getting, are they positive and negative or whatever, right? And you can take all the text and you can shove it into Chat GPT and you can ask it to return like a 1 to 10 score. You can also maybe say, you know, please categorize all this, right? You know, is it about. Let's imagine your hotel, right? And you could probably have Chat GPT come back and tell you, is this about the cleaning? Is it about the reception? Is it about room or. And so you could use it like that and you can actually have it feed in that information that analysis back into a robot functions. Got it, got it. Use it along with the robot. But of course, I mean ChatGPT is amazing in many ways and maybe a little dangerous also, clearly.

So when you think about competencies for rpa, what are they?

I actually think a lot of it is again because it actually is being very similar to CI as more or less mentioned. I just really see it as a CI tool. So of course you need to be able to program a robot if you have to build it, right. I think if you know how to build a macro in Excel, you actually be able to pick it up fairly easy. It's not really that difficult to start learning at least of course you become better and better as you practice Right. So, of course, you need some technical skill and you need to find that interesting and fun. I'm. Let's say I'm all technical. Yeah. Kind of like CI guys. So for me, it's fairly natural. Not everyone would like it, but. But I think that that's, of course, one skill. The next is the process element. You need to be able to. To pick up the process. You need to be able to. To go talk to people, right. And find out and actually understand what. What is the problem. I think this is probably some place where, where C.I. really have a key thing. Right. I mean, C.I. people are good at getting down to. To root cause and actually, actually understand what is really that people need. Because, I mean, people will often not be able to tell you necessarily 100% what is it that they need in a robot. They can just show, you know, what are they doing and what is their problem. But, but sometimes actually the CA person can actually help in identifying, you know, what is really your need. And how can we actually then use a robot to, to support you? I mean, one example of this could maybe be, I mean, actually also when I've been insecting with our Chicago office, is that some robots that we built for them, what was a little bit more challenging, maybe because they get a lot of what they call claim orders or replacement part orders. I mean, you get a replacement part order, it's typically so that the customer can look at like, you know, an assembly manual for this piece of furniture that they're assembling, and then they have to find a part which is what they need. And you say that the feedback on this can sometimes be in the terms. It can be like free text. It can be in many forms. So typically it'll require a human being to actually look at this text from the customer to say, what is it actually need? So it's hard to 100% automate that process. But basically what we have done is that we build a robot that will read the entire order. It'll read what is the. The item or, you know, the product that they have an issue with that they need a spare part for. And then it'll build the entire bill of material for this product. So when the sales assistant is looking at this, they have like the order. You send one page, and they have one part of the page, and they have the bill of material on the other. They can see what they have written. And then they really just have to go and, you know, press a line and say, okay, this is the part they need. And they need to, and then click a button and then the robot will create the order and send it to that person. So it's a much more efficient process than where you say they had to go. And yeah, of course copy paste everything from the order. Right. And then go and look through the bill of material that could be in many different, several layers of the AP system to eventually find the part and then put it in. So you say there's some process skill in understanding how does the people work and how does the AP system work and what can we actually do with a robot. And then of course the last element, which I think is super important, I think you already addressed it with your question earlier, is of course the change management element. Right. I mean, you don't want people to run away scared from robots because they are actually here to help them. Right. And it's important to tell the right stories instead of the stories that make people be scared about rpa.

Yeah, no, and I got to imagine that, you know, especially the, the, the black belt in you when you're looking at processes like often we'll see, you know, not even necessarily rpa, but just sort of general automation is we never want to automate waste, right? Like clean up the process manually, then automate. So am I right to assume that RPA also wants to take that approach? That they want to really streamline everything and then add some automation?

Yeah, and I think it's actually a very interesting question because you could say I've often been been feeling a bit bad that I was not doing this enough. And then I was wondering, you know, what's, what's like the, you know, what's so wrong in this because often I actually tend to just more or less go and automate. And of course, as you say, I don't really want to automate waste. But, but I think when thinking about it, what I try to do when I do this is I try to understand what is the functionality that people really need. So actually I, I actually like to use a morph matrix, you know, try so understand, you know, what's the functionality they need and then come up with how can I solve this. Of course, typically I think in solutions that are robotic, but not necessarily. And then I will build it based on that. But I also say that, I mean I, the process that I'm aiming at is typically one that have a capability that would be impossible to reach for the previous process. So I'd say I'm basically redesigning the process always. So I'm basically scrapping the old process and thereby I'm also, you could say taking out some waste of it because I am just building a new process that is suited for the robot.

Got it.

So I try to identify what's the value in the process, right where we're adding actually to it, and then build a robot that actually does that.

So let's say someone's listening right now and they have some ideas. Oh boy. Yeah, we could experiment running with some RPA on some, like you mentioned a sales process. You know, somebody gets a lot of purchase orders coming in. You know, every hour they get hundreds of purchase orders for maybe their product, but they have no idea how to even begin to think about doing rpa. Like finding a program or finding a, like what resources do you have? Do you recommend folks look into if they want to experiment with this for themselves?

I mean, I mean we use a product called UiPath and I mean UiPath, you can basically just go on the homepage and then you can sign up for the free training. And I'm sure you could say other of the big companies will have this too. So there's actually plenty of very good qualified free training. Of course, I know you guys are masters of training videos, but they actually do a pretty good job creating excellent trading videos.

What was the name of the company again?

UI path.

UiPath. Like user interface.

Yes, exactly. Okay.

UI path. Okay.

So you know, Microsoft also have something and you know, others but, but yeah, that definitely. I mean you say when I learned it first I was actually doing robots on another software. But then during you say Covid, I had some, some extra time and actually spent that time on going on UiPath to, to, to spend a couple of weeks learning. So they have like you say a two week program which is actually enough for, for getting you, you started and then you know, from there it's just learning by doing.

Nice, nice. Very good, very good. Well, hey Jakob, if folks wanted to connect with you personally, what's the, what's the best way?

I think Lind is probably just, just the good way of, of getting a hold of me.

Okay, good, good. And so we'll have that linked up so folks can just kind of scroll down on the app there, whatever you're listening on. And, and we'll have, we'll have the link there. Man, this has been really interesting and even every time I think about rpa, I mentioned to you we had someone a couple hundred episodes ago talking about this and I remember there was like, we need to experiment with this. We do some automation type stuff here, even with Gemba Academy, but not probably to the extent that we could. To, as you say, sort of elevate the work and allow folks to, to go do higher level work. Right. To. To add even more value. Because I think that's like with Lean or RPA or any of these things, it's not to replace people, it's to elevate people, I would argue.

Right.

And to, to really help everybody add even more value to the world with the same resources that you have today.

So, yeah, I think that to me, there's so much you can do with rpa, it's almost unlimited. Right. I mean, you can literally do more or less all kind of admin work. Right. Not where people are being creative, but all the rest, which is quite a lot.

Yeah, Fantastic. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, thank you for coming on to the show and yeah, maybe we'll do it again down the road, do RPA number two or something. Awesome. All right, you take care.

Okay. Yeah, thank you very much. Same to you.

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