Imagine that Volkswagens factories, Maersk’s container ships, or the operating rooms at Rigshospitalet all lay dormant 270 days of the year. Few executives would accept that. Still, this is often the case for software robots.

Software robots, robotic process automation, or just the abbreviation, RPA, has become a success in both the private and public sectors. For example, ATP saves 300.000 work hours by letting software robots streamline and automate tasks, according to Computerworld. Similar stories are heard from public authorities and companies all over Denmark.

Software robots represent a significant investment in licenses, IT-infrastructure, education, and technical resources. But the technology is not utilised very efficiently, and many organisations accept a utilisation rate of merely 20-30 percent.

The causes of this poor utilisation are numerous, but to a large extent they concern restrictive and inflexible administration. If a work task takes longer than expected – e.g. if a software problem occurs – this easily blocks all the other tasks, which the robot has been instructed to do. And then this is often not solved before a manual intervention.

It is somewhat paradoxical that you can have the understanding that a process has been automated, when a human has to sit in a room down the hall, giving the robot manual life support. Robots can also stall for many other reasons and need to always be monitored and often restarted manually. We humans only work for 8 hours a day whereas the robots are available 24 hours a day. It is not optimal that they are so dependent on manual oversight. It is costly in labour and creates absolutely no value for the organisation.

Many organisations lack the awareness, however, that the management tools accompanying their RPA solution are simply not good enough. Thereby, they lose out on the significant winnings that lies in implementing a more overarching and intuitive oversight of the software robots.

Experience shows that well-functioning management tools for RPA increase the average utilisation rate to between 50 and 80 percent – doubling the usual rate. At the same time, you can get an overview of all the software robots across the organisation. Hereby, the business gains critical insights into what their digital co-workers are doing, and tasks can be handled automatically with the most critical ones being prioritised.

This gives you more automation and efficiency for your money and minimises the power use of the hardware and cloud services you do not use, which, in the end, also furthers the green agenda. All without the need for more workers to oversee the robots 24/7. Thus, we minimise a task that is costly for the organisation – and the employee – as the task is about as professionally stimulating as watching grass grow.

So, to lift the use of software robots to the next level and ensure optimal utilisation of our robot colleagues, there is no way around a more holistic management tool.

And that is the reason for the existence of Optomo.