Factors to consider before embarking on the RPA Implementation!!!

A recent survey by Redwood Software of 300 corporate decision makers from the US and the UK founds “79% of enterprises said automation delivered time savings, 69% cited ‘improved business productivity’ as the key benefit of automation, and 61% said automation regularly provides cost savings. Hence more & more organizations are turning to RPA (robotic process automation).

RPA brings a variety of advantages to the table, which is why it is quickly becoming a favorite of so many organizations. Some of these advantages include:

● No more additional investments since RPA uses the existing systems
● Providing results that are reliable and accurate
● Reduction of lead time in the automation of processes, which ultimately saves cost
● Allowing resources to focus on additional/ more complex tasks
● Reliability and the ability to work on multiple projects at once without any kind of break

There has been a lot of research going on in implementing RPA to various organizations, specifically which activities they can be applied to. If you are a multinational organization operating in multiple continents, multiple time zones, and across multiple verticals; RPA will make your teams’ jobs much easier. RPA is one of the best alternatives to traditional workflows and processes handled at most of the banking and financial institutions.

However, before you can begin implementing RPA for your organization, there are a few things you should consider. We take you through each of those points, so that it becomes much easier for you to start implementing RPA!

The process in consideration may be complex or simple, it may be frequently changed or kept static, the automation may need to reduce the lead time, and so on. Once you have listed out and answered all these questions, you will come to know the processes that fit the criteria listed out by you. After identification you can start implementing the RPA automation.

1. Stability of processes: When you are selecting the processes for automation, ensure that they are not changed too frequently. Any process that is constantly subject to changes is a very poor choice for RPA since you will need to change the guidelines under RPA every time the process is changed. A stable process is one which does not require frequent updates, and can save a significant number of man-hours and incurred costs. When a process is selected for RPA implementation, make sure you are clear about the goal for automation in your mind.

2. Scalability of process: When setting up RPA in your organization, it may seem logical to deploy it at a smaller scale. However, once the benefits of RPA come to light, you will want to deploy the same automation throughout your organization. Therefore, it makes more sense to think big and implement RPA on the processes that can be scaled massively, and are critical to your organization’s global operations.

3. Speed of implementation: One of the main objectives behind setting up RPA for your processes is to save time and money for your organization. RPA that requires your team to put in a lot of extra effort with respect to coding, or takes up a lot of man hours for your team in spite of automatically executing the tasks it is assigned to do, is not the right fit for your processes, and should be avoided. The whole purpose of implementing an RPA is to design and create robotic processes in a few hours or less, and optimize the robots, so they can carry out the same responsibilities from then on. An RPA solution that allows you flexibility while creating and performing operations is the best solution for your organization.

4. Implementation intelligence: The RPA solution you implement should have the agility to apply appropriate business rules within a process to make sense of complex data, extract the information required from it, and modify it to enrich and transform the data according to your business needs. These solutions should ideally be able to read and write to any data source, and support the task-based activities that they are assigned.

5. Simplicity and Reliability: If your RPA solution is more complex than the task it is trying to automate, it will not achieve the desired results. Any RPA that needs an IT ticket to be created every time it makes a change is slowing down the time required for processes to be carried out. Your RPA should be so simple that any employee in your organization should be able to build them and use them for various types of work, from gathering data to changing the data into desired business information. Reliability is an equally important factor to be considered before implementing an RPA solution. Your RPA will have the responsibility to carry out hundreds, maybe even thousands, of tasks. Therefore, an RPA which has built-in analytics and monitoring will definitely be preferred.

Apart from the above factors, there are many more things you should keep in mind, such as whether you’re using the right tools for automation, which technology platforms get you the best results, and how much automation will you need for getting the expected results. All in all, these factors will help you analyze and monitor all the right processes before you can implement your RPA on them.