What do clever mice 🐭 and the SAS 🗡️ have in common?

This came to me while watching the excellent SAS Rogue Heroes on BBC iPlayer earlier. Let me explain

When reviewing a task we have been asked to automate we find that people usually describe WHAT they are doing but not WHY. And the WHY is the important bit.

Typically, the incumbent worker will start by producing a long list of steps they repeat every time. It can often take hours, or in some cases, days 😵

Like a good soldier, they have been given orders and they follow these faithfully, without question 🫡 This means that there is no room for improvement, and when something changes, the process breaks ⛓️‍💥

Meanwhile, the SAS trainer told his new recruits to ask WHY they had been given their orders. ‘Ask questions’, he says. ‘Because when everything turns to 💩, as it usually does, when you know why, you’ll still know how to complete your mission’ (paraphrasing).

For example, the mouse on the left follows a winding and well-trodden path. It gets the cheese. It works. It might have always worked 🐁🧀🐁🧀
This what your average Robotic Process Automation vendor will do. It takes time to run through all those steps every time and even longer to map out and program them in the first place.

The mouse on the right knows it has to get the cheese, but it’s not bound by the long list of instructions. By understanding the goal, it almost always can ignore most of the steps the other mouse takes, getting to the cheese in a fraction of the time and being able to navigate its way around problems that might appear 😼🪤

At Autometrix, we don’t automate steps. We automate tasks.

So we know how to handle it when things aren’t exactly as described. We ask questions until we understand the process first. Compared to off-the-shelf software, our custom-built solutions are usually faster to implement and always much faster to run 🏃‍♂️💨

We dare you to try us.

(No animals, real or badly drawn were harmed in the production of this post)