No attitude, no overtime, no personal distractions. Robotic process automation is a human resource manager’s dream. It doesn’t sound bad to workers either. Handing over those repetitive tasks means more time to be truly productive at work.

So how do you hire a digital colleague? It’s not like they have LinkedIn profiles. A search for “bot” returns plenty of job posts recruiting RPA developers, but no robotic worker has (yet) hung out a shingle and announced itself ready to work.

Contracting a developer to create a personalized bot for your business is one option. Cheaper and easier would be finding a company that specializes in robotic process as a service. Stepping up to the plate is cloud sourcing services provider OneSource Virtual Inc.

“We want to be able to offer this digital worker in a fully hosted and maintained model, where the customer can just subscribe to it rather than having to do all the investment themselves,” said Cay Gliebe (pictured), senior vice president of marketing and product management at OneSource Virtual.

Gliebe spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Automation Anywhere Imagine event in New York City. They discussed how OneSource Virtual is going full-bore on automating processes within their own company, for customers and as a service (see the full interview with transcript here).  (* Disclosure below.)

This week, the CUBE spotlights Cay Gliebe in its Women in Tech feature.

Charting a career from the military to automation

Military training was the kickstarter for a 30-year career that gave Gliebe experience in human resources, marketing, operations, product management and sales. She does double duty as senior vice president of both the marketing and product management departments at OneSource Virtual, as well as traveling to promote RPaaS and business process as a service solutions around the world.

Gliebe is also an accomplished artist, and her photorealistic paintings of the natural world are on exhibit at the Sawnee Association of Arts Center in her home town of Cumming, Georgia.

Named one of 2019’s top 10 most influential women in technology, Gliebe’s advocacy for automation puts her is at the forefront of one of the hottest trends in workplace transformation, RPaaS.

RPaaS is a natural evolution for OneSource Virtual. Bypassing the traditional model, the company has offered cloud-based services from day one. Founded in 2008 to offer BPaaS solutions for clients around finance and human resource software as a service provider Workday Inc., OneSource Virtual has become known as a leader in the automation field.

“If [Workday customers] need the platform implemented or they want to outsource their payroll or their [accounts payable] automation, OneSource Virtual’s their company,” Gliebe explained.

Increased productivity means greater profit margins

Financial audits, running reports, compiling data and sending reminder emails are just a few of the repetitive tasks that take up hours of employee time. Like household chores, they are the most despised items on the daily to-do list. Handing them off to a bot makes sense, and unlike a human employee, a digital worker can handle multiple tasks simultaneously without breaking a sweat. In fact, Gliebe estimated that one bot can handle the repetitive workload of five full-time human employees.

“The more we can make the digital worker cover multiple functions, then the more valuable it is,” Gliebe said. OneSource Virtual provides services to over 600 Workday customers, all of which could benefit from task automation.

“Not that we will get rid of those employees,” Gliebe is quick to reassure. Instead, digital colleagues will assist their human counterparts, freeing them to focus on the creative aspects of their position or train in new skills. The benefit to companies include reduced costs, which in turn leads to increased profit margins.

“Everybody wants margin,” Gliebe stated. “That’s how you stay in business.”

Fast and furious focus on automation

OneSource Virtual only started to focus on RPA in January 2019, but the company’s progress has been impressive. “We have engaged customers and partners and advisors. We’ve been talking to the analysts. We’ve been working internally, so it’s been a very fast and furious four months getting going,” Gliebe said.

There are three facets to the way OneSource Virtual is using RPA for transformation. First is within the company itself — to automate internal processes. The second is within its existing business services: “We have a product; our product happens to be delivering services, and it’s ripe for doing more digital automation,” Gliebe said.

The third and most ambitious focus is RPaaS. This was an idea sparked as an extension of offering RPA for the company’s existing business clients. While these services would be available to in-house customers, there is also a market of businesses that use Workday but do not want to outsource financial or personnel management processes. These businesses would still benefit from the automated processes created by OneSource Virtual for in house use, Gliebe pointed out.

“They have the same challenges we have, and it makes sense for them to be able to get access to the worker,” she said.

Bots have bad memories

One concern Gliebe sees potential RPaaS customers having is a fear of bots “remembering” sensitive data. This is due to a misconception. “The reality is [bots] don’t hold data,” Gliebe said. “A person could potentially remember what they saw. The digital worker will never remember what they saw.”

A library of robotic processes will soon be available through a specific RPaaS portal created by OneSource Virtual. These include payroll data validation, payroll employee timesheet activity notifications, benefit enrollment and changes, and 1099 audit to identify missing information and validate tax IDs against the IRS website.

The RPaaS project is only just in beta-testing, and Gliebe is reluctant to commit to projections of success. However, interest in the project is high. “I have about 17 customers on our advisory board that all want it right now,” Gliebe said. “When we showed them the demo, they’re like: ‘Can I buy it? Right now?’”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Automation Anywhere Imagine. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Imagine event. Neither Automation Anywhere, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE