Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – Five steps to make huge business impact
As everyone is wound up on doing Rapid Process Automation or Robotic Process Automation, its important to understand the pitfalls of these projects before jumping into solution-ing mode. Below are five steps we suggest that you consider to enable a successful RPA implementation and result in savings and measurable business impact.
1. Identity clearly all processes that you can which fits the rule of repeatable, structured/digitally digestible, and rules driven. If either of these attributes are not a characteristic of the existing process, there is not much business impact you will gain and it wouldn’t make any sense to automate to start with.
2. Using the processes identified as part of step 1, create a financial model that calculates the saving which becomes the business case plus result in a continuous source of funding as you complete each processes.
3. Pick a process that is non sensitive, doesn’t have confidentiality or less confidential to start with. Definitely I don’t recommend highly sensitive processes (e.g. payroll) for Robotic Process Automation and care should be maintained so as to not automate things just for saving labor cost as sometimes people involved in processes are not just doing the actual procedures but maybe other things such as support in terms of answering questions from employees, partners and clients. This may not result in any savings even after automation. So be mindful of which process you start with – goes back to step 1.
4. Don’t put focus on Robotic Process Automation technology and start talking with product vendors. As much as technology is important, process optimization and monitoring is much more important. When it comes to technology, just make sure the vendor providing the solution aligns with business outcome/ measure. Majority of the organizations engaged in RPA are not in the business of software so you don’t want to focus on non Core or IP related functions such as using your employees for maintenance and training. The focus should be given to capturing process information from internal/external stakeholders, process inspection and instrumenting process with RPA to aid in automation and result in cost savings financially and improved productivity , overall experience.
5. The hard truth- most of the Robotic Process Automation vendors you are working with haven’t even automated their internal processes via RPA. So be conscious of that. Put the focus more on business process architecting vs development and also the vendor services / licensing cost needs to be more performance measure based vs pure services cost via T&M / fixed cost. In other words you should be able to pick a vendor who can work based on compensating them-self via cost savings that shall be realized in outcomes (Performance based outcomes). By that way the rest is assured they are in for the long term win vs the short term financials
We can share further more insights from various Robotic Process Automation or Rapid Process Automation solutions across different verticals and process. Let us know.