#54 The squeaky chair episode....Is RPA difficult to learn?

Welcome to another episode of The Process in Automation Podcast. I'm Sascha Cotura, and with me as always is Arno van Rijn, and together we are The Automation Guys. And all our listeners out there know we are extremely passionate about all things automation, hence we can't stop, stop recording our new episodes. And today is again a bit of a premiere since we started the podcast last year, recorded all episodes apart from each other via Zoom, which worked very well. But today we are recording it here in London in a meeting room. So it's really, really exciting to do this together for the first time. And with that, we welcome you all to another RPA episode. And as we know, there are huge numbers of enterprises out there who already experimented with robotic process automation, and they have great use cases, those very nice successes. But scaling this up very often is still a challenge. And yeah, but as RPA starts to become more and more like a commodity and the standard toolsets, So I think we mentioned it last year already, so Microsoft started to put this on everyone's machine, so hence everyone is a bit more focused on that and everyone wants to get onto that automation train as well. So, but here on the podcast and the feedback we get over and over again, we get asked how easy is it actually to learn RPA and where to start and how to make it a success. So Arno, Let's kick it off. Is RPA difficult to learn?

Thank you, Sasha, and it's good to be in London today doing a face-to-face recording. The bottom line is RPA is not difficult to learn as it doesn't require any programming knowledge to get started. So common RPA tools like UiPath, for example, can be used by recording tasks without any coding. And, you know, if you have advanced tasks that you require with inside your robotic sequence, as they call it. And, you know, some limited programming skills are required. RPA is probably one of the easiest technologies to get, you know, basic grip or grasp of in next to no time and, you know, build up skills very quickly. And, you know, you could use it regularly to automate many of the computer tasks you previously had to do manually, and this saves a lot of time. So this is responding to emails, creating spreadsheets, management reports, little things like that that you have to click around and scrape data from various systems. So RPA really takes that burden away and speeds that up and really make your day a bit more productive.

All right, yeah, then let's have a look at some of the reasons why RPA is not too difficult to learn. So to start learning about RPA, that's the first big part. You don't need to be a programmer, you don't need to have programming skills or sort of development knowledge. A lot of people who work with RPA tools and software are actually not programmers, as they use RPA to automate sort of the tasks they are doing manually. And of course, as Arno mentioned earlier, that saves a lot of time.

And, um, yeah, and I guess, you know, RPA is easier to learn than other technologies. Um, we find that RPA has a sort of a lower learning curve to understand its underlying principles and to become proficient in some of the RPA software to a level where you can actually use it in real life automation tasks that you want to obviously automate, you know, it's quite easy. So RPA is software that's designed for normal people to use as well as advanced users and developers. And, you know, there is intuitive ways built into the actual RPA software that makes it really easy to, to learn You can become proficient in the basics of RPA very quickly if you spend a few hours a day, you know, over a couple of weeks. RPA software is what we call low-code software, and it uses a lot of drag-and-drop functionality. We talk a lot about that in the podcast, and that really allows you to, you know, create these automated tasks by dragging activities into what's called sequences. You know, with the RPA software, and that then creates your automation script for, you know, for effectively your workflow that you wish to execute. And this could be something where you receive an email and you need to scrape data from the email and you need to go enter that into various systems and send a response email out. So this makes it really easy to quickly turn a manual task into an automated one without needing to write any code to do so. So overall, I would say getting to a basic level of proficiency takes very little time, you know, all because the, the learning curve required isn't really that steep in compared to other technologies.

Yeah, indeed. So to grasp the fundamentals of RPA, it is, it is very easy indeed. Yeah, that allows you actually very quickly to progress very quickly in using the software to automate a lot of software you use on a daily basis, like your Excel or Outlook or maybe your finance tool. Yeah, this is also fundamental to differentiate between an activity. Arno mentioned the sequence and to differentiate between the activity and the sequence and sort of sort of triggers. So there are a few sort of terminologies in RPA you need to just understand, but once, once you get used to it, um, so you can build, build things very easily. Um, but basically you, you sort of look at your work you're doing and you're slicing in lots of activities like a mouse click and moving the mouse to, to a certain place and clicking a specific application. So So with all those kind of very specific things, which are very common in all sorts of RPA software tools. So then you can build your sequences and you have your list of activities in that sequence and that can be sort of run again and again. And that sort of is your, so your RPA process at the end and it's just taking away all that stuff from you going forward. Yeah. So yeah, so you can go really detailed into it. But so these, these tools are supporting you a lot by basically defining these sequences also in a low-code and more automatic way.

Yeah. And then again, there's tons of material, you know, out there if you want to get started with RPA. You know, there's, there's many courses out there that can be used, and that's very easily you know, followed, and that can be easily, uh, sort of used to, to get started. Um, we at Automation Guys, we've got a couple of courses to actually get you started with your RPA journey. This is anything from automating stuff that comes into a shared inbox, for example, CRM automation, marketing automation, onboarding automation, um, lots of, um, courses on automations with Insight Finance, you know, the basic things that you want to get started with. Of course, there's also many RPA learning aids outside, you know, the kind of official kind of curriculum that's out there for these type of courses. I'm talking about forums, YouTube videos, etc. And again, I think, you know, learn by doing is the best. You know, most people find it easier to learn by doing. You know, it's a bit like driving a car. You can read about how to drive a car, but until you actually drive a car, you know, that, that will make you a good driver. And it's the same is true for, for RPA as well. And, you know, you have to practice the RPA skills. You have to, you know, build your first robot, your first automation understand, you know, what, what RPA can, can do for you in terms of the tasks that it can automate for you, stuff that you might do day to day. You can find an opportunity to say, well, this is something I do every day and it's a repeating task, and wouldn't it be nice if I have a software bot that can do that for me? And I think, you know, this is where having a fully functional RPA sandbox, in my view, is absolutely imperative, you know, to, to learn this technology by building these simple robots and then graduating later to create more complicated automations.

Yeah, absolutely true. So setting up with RPA or starting with RPA sometimes can be a bit tricky. So this RPA sandbox is really, really important and should speed up learning or will speed up the learning. And Yeah, so we know from lots of people downloading a software like the vendor maybe suggests, it's easy just pressing setup.exe. But yes, very often there's prerequisites, and then this driver needs to be installed, this library needs to be on the machine, is the server version the right one? So all these things sometimes can be a challenge if you're not a very technical person. So, or some very often when it comes to corporate environments as well, you can't just install RPA on on your laptop, yeah. So you need permissions and suddenly, yeah, you wouldn't be able to have a good sandbox if you have all those challenges and you can't get started then. So this is why it's really important to have a dedicated sandbox in place. And yeah, this is where Arno and I thought it's really, really helpful when we here at The Automation Guys are providing that sandbox to to everyone who is interested in that. So hence we have started the memberships as the Automation Guys community memberships. And so we have several offers there in place for everyone who is interested to learn automation with RPA and of course beyond. We're not just about RPA, but the sandbox is a very is a key part of the membership because RPA will help you to tackle lots of your tedious tasks you see on a daily basis. And yeah, so this is why we created the membership. So as part of the membership, we also do a lot of expert talks, Q&A sessions. So we also have events now, more and more live events as well here in London or somewhere else. Where all our members want to meet up. So with the membership, we provide a lot of these real-world use cases and learning materials so you can really get going. And so as Arno mentioned, sort of getting started by doing it only also makes sense if it's not just a typical hello world process. It probably needs to be more than that to succeed in the real world. So hence we have created a huge list of modules you can go through. And with that membership, we also have a community, a community with other like-minded people. Everyone is as passionate as Arno and I in that community, hopefully. So you will then join that community and you can bounce ideas, you can get advice, ideas of use cases, what else can be automated. What successes have others seen? So all these things come together in the Automation Guys community, and yeah, this is what we invite you to have a look at and to join.

Yeah, so it's a very exciting announcement actually, and we, like César mentioned, we felt that learning RPA by actually doing RPAs that the best way to, to get up to speed using the technology and also to realize its potential. And, you know, having access to the Automation Guy membership area obviously gives you access to a fully functional robotic process automation environment. It's got all of the tools loaded, so there's no installation required. You can get up and running in a few minutes. And there are a couple of modules that you can use to get started. So it's a perfect place to experiment with RPA. If you're out there and you've heard the term RPA before, but it was really hard to get started, you might have some restrictions on installing software and doing all of the technical bits, which might be a barrier for you. What we're doing is we're making that go away. We provide you with the environment itself, and really it provides you a springboard to kind of get started and show off your skills, how you could use RPA to start these automation journeys by automating little tasks, playing with automation within the environment. And hopefully, like I said, you will then graduate towards something bigger, and perhaps you could promote this with inside your business, show off your skills, show off what you can do with RPA, and get noticed in the process. I think that a lot of people has got the skill and ability to use automation technologies, specifically low-code technologies. We've definitely seen, seen some creative business citizen developers as we call them. And the message is, if you have repeating mundane activities you do on a day-to-day task or day-to-day basis, like monitoring a shared inbox and waiting for an email to come in, copying data from an email to a spreadsheet, taking the spreadsheet and then emailing that to a colleague, and then copying, pasting data into various systems, the sandbox is a very, very good way to practice perhaps how to automate those mundane activities.

Yeah, and ideate, isn't it, on things? What is the art of possible as well? What could be done? Maybe you have an idea, hey, I have a spreadsheet with 1,000 rows, I don't want to process it manually in the finance system. Okay, let's play around with it. What can I do with that spreadsheet? Can I go to another website and populate maybe some fields I do daily manually. So yeah, so I think it gives really also room for not just practice, also for just, just take an idea a little bit further without risk. This is the thing. So you don't have to go to your IT and say, oh, can I please install this here and run this here on the environment? Everyone would say no. But here in this sandbox, yep, you can do it risk-free.

So what's included? So we've installed RPA software for you that you can get access to pretty much instantly. We've also installed Microsoft Office so you can get access to Excel, Word. So if you want to do some automation around that, PowerPoint for example, We've also provisioned a fully functional Outlook account for you. So if you want to play around with sending and receiving emails using a robot, that's all possible. That's all included. So it's a very exciting offering. It's a very exciting place to go and play. We also included a CRM application, which is a dummy application loaded with some data. So what you can do is show off your skills to interact with a CRM application. Of course, in the real world, you can transfer those skills to interact with your own CRM application once you adopt RPA. So what we want to do is just kind of make this really easy and accessible to potential RPA developers out there. We know there's lots of them. We know that from the feedback we get from, you know, the members of our podcast community. A lot of people was interested in this, and that really prompted us to, to really provide this solution for them. So it's exciting to, to, to, to get people involved in that. Please go to our website automationguys.net. You will find there is subscription options. Feel free to, to have a look at that, and, you know, become a member and challenge yourself. And, you know, obviously we, we look forward to, to, you know, lots of people utilizing these sandboxes and providing us feedback of, you know, the sort of things that they built, the sort of things they, they wish us to actually put examples out and really kind of just grow the community and, and really push the boundaries of automation further.

Yeah, this is just the start. So whatever we have prepared for you to look at on the Automation Sandbox and in the 24/7 community and member zone. And it's just the start, but there's so much more to come. And of course, for everyone who's joining and gives us feedback, so we put more and more content in there, more use cases, more modules, learning guides. Yeah, whatever comes up as feedback as well. Yeah, it will be exciting to become a member. All right.

So I think that's it. Yeah.

So that announcement. Yeah, that's it for now. As always, thank you very much for listening and come back next time and for our next episodes. And please share your feedback as always. We really appreciate that. And yeah, so Until next time, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process in Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time and until then, Let's automate it!