7 ms·

The Most Mindnumbing of Office Tasks Made One Man $360M

36 points by monsieurpng 7y ago

sarcasmatwork 7y ago
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-tasks-made-one-man-360-million-1.1216472 https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-t...
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
Damnit, I had 5 years of box-ticking work I could have done, but now I can't because of this guy!
r00fus 7y ago
Does anyone know exactly what his "bots" were automating? Article is low on that content.
- anfractuosity 7y ago
  Yeah I was wondering that too, I'm just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation which makes it sound like robotic process automation, might replicate people interacting with GUI programs? But it's still not clear to me, as to what kind of programs they're using it for.
  - andylynch 7y ago
    100 % correct. It is a kludge, but there is a lot of room in big companies to automate workflows between existing/ legacy app this way, where it’s not simple or maybe even possible to use APIs.
- jolmg 7y ago
  Their site[1] is low on content, too. It might be that what they were automating was different on each customer company. It's only a guess, but it seems viable that they might go to a company, see what easily automatable tasks they're doing by hand, and offer to write a script for that task. If that was the case, I wonder how they managed to monetize it that much. [1] https://rpa-holdings.com/en/ https://rpa-holdings.com/en/
- sjg007 7y ago
  After reading a couple of case studies on their website, it looks like GUIs... I'm guessing they use something similar to AutoIT with screen recording. I worked on a lot of AutoIT back in the day... This is probably a good market to get into for any saavy entrepreneur.
- eastbayjake 7y ago
  A lot of these RPA processes use tools like UiPath to automate clicks on a Windows desktop computer. The article's stated use case (scanning paper applications and entering it into the system) sounds like OCR getting text off the page, doing some sanity checks, then keying it into the system with automated clicks in a VM. Ordinarily you'd just expose an API to pass through that data, but for lots of legacy systems it's faster and less expensive to have an RPA bot just literally key data into the old interface. Source: the enterprise things these eyes have seen
metaprinter 7y ago
This is gonna be a mechanical turk 100% guaranteed
lph 7y ago
tl;dr: if you call computer programs “software robots”, Bloomberg will think you’re a genius.
- llampx 7y ago
  I prefer to call them wizards, it sounds more... magical.
  - kgilpin 7y ago
    “Wizards” also sounds kind of Windows 98 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)
    - llampx 7y ago
      That's what I meant :)
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a standard term in that line of business. I did some work for an RPA company a few years ago. They have a nice explanation of the concept here: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/products/robotic-process-automation https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/products/robotic-pr... Many more examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=Robotic+Process+Automation https://www.google.com/search?q=Robotic+Process+Automation
- inerte 7y ago
  It's a standard term in non-software companies. I used to work for a telecom supplier 10 years ago and we wrote "bots" to automate workflow.
seibelj 7y ago
My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per week each, all year long. They were all middle aged or older people and had done basically the same thing for over a decade. So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long. No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.
- strathmeyer 7y ago
  I met someone who once worked a summer changing addresses from all uppercase to mixed case. I was once given two employees for a day at my job to change the file extensions in a folder of HTML documents. Why don't our bosses understand what we're capable of?
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      > If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.
      - colechristensen 7y ago
        As engineering orgs are usually so bad that they consistently have a years' work "to do" regardless of actual usefulness or business need. The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.
simonw 7y ago
> Japanese mortgage lender Aruhi Corp. started using RPA Holdings’ services in January 2017 to automate some application processes. It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications and then check that everything is in order. That’s cut the average time taken per application to about 10 minutes from an hour. Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?
- munchbunny 7y ago
  I don't think you can translate that problem statement into programmer speak without a specific understanding of the problem space and the original manual process. My best guess is OCR plus whatever redundant checks are necessary to prevent errors, plus CRUD apps and whatever else is needed for occasional manual intervention.
- jolmg 7y ago
  > It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications Read document using OCR > then check that everything is in order then verify the consistency of what you read with other data sources that you have available (SQL database, web APIs, CRUD webapps, etc.).
- entelechy0 7y ago
  the data had already been scanned, so they're just processing it. i'm a programmer and this is very clear to me.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  You know how you can use Selenium or (on the command line) `expect` to script tasks that aren't APIable? This guy made a company doing that for GUIs that are commonly in use in Japan. Japan suffers from some early adopter pain in that a lot of the software they have now accelerated productivity greatly when introduced but is now coming up against the shortcomings of non-hookable software and now exists through path dependency alone. Making that automatable turns out to be hella valuable.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Wow. This article says almost nothing at all.
0898 7y ago
Let me see if I have this right: robotic process automation means automating ordinary desktop software by simulating cursor and keyboard inputs?
- blakeburch 7y ago
  That's correct. I had to do some research into the market at one point. From my brief exposure, it's really just "macros" and "macro recorders" of old, being re-sold under the new enterprise buzzword of "RPA". Other big leaders in the space are Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and BluePrism.
paulio 7y ago
I'd like a bot which ripped the articles from Bloomberg and created a simple lightweight output. It's Getting to the point where I avoid anything on Bloomberg.
- greggyb 7y ago
  Firefox has a built in reader mode which works on Bloomberg (and basically all places I've wanted to use it). https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
- ducttapecrown 7y ago
  Turn Javascript off.
- pkaye 7y ago
  If you disable javascript for bloomberg, it simplifies the pages. Unfortunately they also blur the images.
goatherders 7y ago
I've actually spun off a company to do exactly this for small businesses. Slack, trello, zapier, CRMs...the potential to automate is MASSIVE and a wildly underserved market. It used to be that knowing how to be expert at Excel made you irreplaceable. Same goes now for power users of Zapier and other workflow automation tools.
neonate 7y ago
https://outline.com/XWtspH https://outline.com/XWtspH

36 points by monsieurpng 7y ago

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-tasks-made-one-man-360-million-1.1216472 https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-most-mindnumbing-of-office-t...

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

Damnit, I had 5 years of box-ticking work I could have done, but now I can't because of this guy!

r00fus 7y ago

Does anyone know exactly what his "bots" were automating? Article is low on that content.

anfractuosity 7y ago
Yeah I was wondering that too, I'm just reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation which makes it sound like robotic process automation, might replicate people interacting with GUI programs? But it's still not clear to me, as to what kind of programs they're using it for.
- andylynch 7y ago
  100 % correct. It is a kludge, but there is a lot of room in big companies to automate workflows between existing/ legacy app this way, where it’s not simple or maybe even possible to use APIs.
jolmg 7y ago
Their site[1] is low on content, too. It might be that what they were automating was different on each customer company. It's only a guess, but it seems viable that they might go to a company, see what easily automatable tasks they're doing by hand, and offer to write a script for that task. If that was the case, I wonder how they managed to monetize it that much. [1] https://rpa-holdings.com/en/ https://rpa-holdings.com/en/
sjg007 7y ago
After reading a couple of case studies on their website, it looks like GUIs... I'm guessing they use something similar to AutoIT with screen recording. I worked on a lot of AutoIT back in the day... This is probably a good market to get into for any saavy entrepreneur.
eastbayjake 7y ago
A lot of these RPA processes use tools like UiPath to automate clicks on a Windows desktop computer. The article's stated use case (scanning paper applications and entering it into the system) sounds like OCR getting text off the page, doing some sanity checks, then keying it into the system with automated clicks in a VM. Ordinarily you'd just expose an API to pass through that data, but for lots of legacy systems it's faster and less expensive to have an RPA bot just literally key data into the old interface. Source: the enterprise things these eyes have seen

metaprinter 7y ago

This is gonna be a mechanical turk 100% guaranteed

lph 7y ago

tl;dr: if you call computer programs “software robots”, Bloomberg will think you’re a genius.

llampx 7y ago
I prefer to call them wizards, it sounds more... magical.
- kgilpin 7y ago
  “Wizards” also sounds kind of Windows 98 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)
  - llampx 7y ago
    That's what I meant :)
Stratoscope 7y ago
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a standard term in that line of business. I did some work for an RPA company a few years ago. They have a nice explanation of the concept here: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/products/robotic-process-automation https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/products/robotic-pr... Many more examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=Robotic+Process+Automation https://www.google.com/search?q=Robotic+Process+Automation
inerte 7y ago
It's a standard term in non-software companies. I used to work for a telecom supplier 10 years ago and we wrote "bots" to automate workflow.

seibelj 7y ago

My buddy worked at a health insurance company where a 6 person team essentially copied and pasted columns from 1 excel spreadsheet into another, 40 hours per week each, all year long. They were all middle aged or older people and had done basically the same thing for over a decade. So he wrote a VB script where you could drag the first excel sheet onto it, and it popped out the second one! No need to manually copy and paste all day long. No one ever used it and they became extremely angry at him, and eventually he quit as all his coworkers in the department saw him as "taking away jobs". Now he does VB and SQL work for a travel company.

strathmeyer 7y ago
I met someone who once worked a summer changing addresses from all uppercase to mixed case. I was once given two employees for a day at my job to change the file extensions in a folder of HTML documents. Why don't our bosses understand what we're capable of?
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. There’s nothing more annoying than people with nothing to do who don’t have the personal drive to seek and solve problems.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    > If you someday become a boss, you’ll understand a big part of your job is finding work to keep your employees busy, so that when the “real” work comes along you’ll have the staff to do what’s necessary. Are you an engineering manager? This doesn't match my experiences at all.
    - colechristensen 7y ago
      As engineering orgs are usually so bad that they consistently have a years' work "to do" regardless of actual usefulness or business need. The opposite problem of people without the drive to find work to do is people driven to constantly change or improve things without clear ideas about why it needs to be done or if it is justifiable. Repeat for a few years and your product is a mish-mash of half completed upgrades held together with twine and yet another rehash in planning to finally fix it all.

simonw 7y ago

> Japanese mortgage lender Aruhi Corp. started using RPA Holdings’ services in January 2017 to automate some application processes. It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications and then check that everything is in order. That’s cut the average time taken per application to about 10 minutes from an hour. Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?

munchbunny 7y ago
I don't think you can translate that problem statement into programmer speak without a specific understanding of the problem space and the original manual process. My best guess is OCR plus whatever redundant checks are necessary to prevent errors, plus CRUD apps and whatever else is needed for occasional manual intervention.
jolmg 7y ago
> It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications Read document using OCR > then check that everything is in order then verify the consistency of what you read with other data sources that you have available (SQL database, web APIs, CRUD webapps, etc.).
entelechy0 7y ago
the data had already been scanned, so they're just processing it. i'm a programmer and this is very clear to me.
scarejunba 7y ago
You know how you can use Selenium or (on the command line) `expect` to script tasks that aren't APIable? This guy made a company doing that for GUIs that are commonly in use in Japan. Japan suffers from some early adopter pain in that a lot of the software they have now accelerated productivity greatly when introduced but is now coming up against the shortcomings of non-hookable software and now exists through path dependency alone. Making that automatable turns out to be hella valuable.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Wow. This article says almost nothing at all.

0898 7y ago

Let me see if I have this right: robotic process automation means automating ordinary desktop software by simulating cursor and keyboard inputs?

blakeburch 7y ago
That's correct. I had to do some research into the market at one point. From my brief exposure, it's really just "macros" and "macro recorders" of old, being re-sold under the new enterprise buzzword of "RPA". Other big leaders in the space are Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and BluePrism.

paulio 7y ago

I'd like a bot which ripped the articles from Bloomberg and created a simple lightweight output. It's Getting to the point where I avoid anything on Bloomberg.

greggyb 7y ago
Firefox has a built in reader mode which works on Bloomberg (and basically all places I've wanted to use it). https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
ducttapecrown 7y ago
Turn Javascript off.
pkaye 7y ago
If you disable javascript for bloomberg, it simplifies the pages. Unfortunately they also blur the images.

goatherders 7y ago

I've actually spun off a company to do exactly this for small businesses. Slack, trello, zapier, CRMs...the potential to automate is MASSIVE and a wildly underserved market. It used to be that knowing how to be expert at Excel made you irreplaceable. Same goes now for power users of Zapier and other workflow automation tools.

neonate 7y ago

https://outline.com/XWtspH https://outline.com/XWtspH