Carragee Consulting

It took my roommate only 3 weeks and a desktop application to automate my first job.

The first job I did after college was domestic airline pricing. I moved to a new city where I knew no one to take the job because it sounded like a great way to apply my econ degree and fly all over the world for free.

The reality of the job was it was mind numbingly boring AND I wasn’t all that good at it. 3x a day we got data dumps of ticket prices (fares) from other airlines. We had to comb through the most important city pairs to find where our pricing was not following the strategy defined for each of those markets. Typically we had between 50-80K competitor fare changes to review every few hours.

We used software to find most of the matching ticket rule combination, but you started to recognize patterns in the 7 character codes and to know what the rules for advance purchase and minimum stay requirements (the two key price segmentation attributes) were at a glance.

I’m dyslexic. I wasn’t very good at manually typing out our matching codes, or ensuring I typed in prices correctly, without missing digits or transposed numbers.

My roommate, Paul, was far better at the actual mechanics of the job, but also not interested in doing menial work. He figured out a script in Excel using VBA which took a few seconds to run and create a summarized list of recommended changes for 65,536 fares (the row limit in xls at the time) with >99% accuracy (way better than human).

The airline I worked for didn’t immediately trust Paul’s script and fire the 16 people working in my department, but I could see the writing on the wall and I left the job before I’d traveled to many of the world destinations I had planned to visit.

Two years ago I was talking to a rowing friend who worked in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and had some UiPath certifications. I hadn’t realized that there were so many companies addressing automation from the front end, automating the actual clicks and characters a user would do.

I waffle between thinking RPA is lipstick on a pig — why should you have to page through websites to extract data? why not write an API to tap the the data source directly?–and thinking RPA is the practical approach to freeing up people’s time to work on the interesting, strategic stuff.

Instead of re-engineering a whole process and eliminating system inefficiency, RPA interacts with systems as though it were a massively more efficient human user. It does not remove redundant steps or streamline processes, it just does them quickly, and in a consistently repeated way.

Big structural changes take time, technical skills, & change management. Sometimes they can pay huge dividends, but they are never without risk and set backs.

RPA can be used around the edges and in distributed ways, implemented by small nimble teams or individuals to keep things moving.

Its not an Either/Or proposition its Yes/And.