Automation has become an integral component of digital transformation strategies for enterprises around the world. Specifically, today robotic process automation (RPA) is the technology of choice to streamline business operations and reduce costs. But how do you judge whether your RPA initiative is successful? It’s not just whether the first “go live” instance does well. It’s about building momentum with strategically selected RPA projects so you continuously automate more and more complex business processes, and achieve a sustainable—and ever-increasing—ROI.
To realize this kind of success, you should follow the below mentioned 8 critical best practices that leading companies have learned from their RPA deployments.
Find an executive sponsor
RPA does not require to rip and replace any existing systems. The tools from leading vendors are intuitive enough so that business users—with appropriate training—can use them without calling on IT. Yet it needs to be involved to make sure automated processes integrate well with the current IT environment. You also need a strategic and holistic vision of how RPA will transform the entire organization rather than just a specific task or function (see No. 3). To overcome these challenges, you need an executive sponsor—one high enough in the organization to help fight for budgets and resources as well as help manage “softer” issues. This executive sponsor should understand the full potential of RPA, and be completely committed to your vision on how you are going to transform the enterprise.
Appoint a chief RPA officer
If your RPA initiative is particularly strategic for your businesses, you may want to move beyond an executive sponsor. Some of the companies on the leading edge of RPA have created a new, senior position to take responsibility for the enterprise-wide rollout of the technology. This person acts as the head of RPA for the enterprise and generally reports to the CEO or CIO.
Create a centralized business plan
All too frequently, organizations wanting to get started with RPA will start with one business process, “just to see how it works.” Then, if that succeeds, they’ll move onto the next one. And the next one. But the problem with beginning the RPA journey this way is that at some point in time, you bump up against the problem of scale: how do you take all these mini-successes and translate them into something that transforms the organization as a whole? You need to have a centralized vision and business plan—typically coming from an RPA center of excellence (COE)—that has dedicated resources to help the various business departments roll out RPA based on a master strategic plan.
Train the trainer, train your employees, train everybody
Once RPA gets a foothold in an organization, it takes off like wildfire. Opportunities to use it to drive even greater efficiencies, productivity, and cost savings open up throughout the enterprise. But for this to happen in a way that aligns with the overall RPA strategy of the organization—people have to be trained. It begins by “training the trainers.blue prism training They have to be fully versed in what RPA can do; what tasks are good candidates for RPA; and how to continually enhance RPA deployments to automate processes of increasing complexity. Then they have to pass this knowledge onto others—employees, managers, anyone who has a stake in your RPA strategy.
Keep development, test, and production environments separate
One of best practices in any project with an SDLC (systems development lifecycle) is to create separate environments to develop and test applications, then put them into production. So, to make sure that only those bots that are ready for production go into production, keep your development, test, and production environments at arm’s length from each other. It should work like this: your bots will be created in the development environment, after which they will be moved over to the test environment, where they undergo functional testing. Only after the testing team has been given the green light should the bot go into production. This is critical.
Achieve consensus and transparency when prioritizing RPA objectives
Critical to the success of any transformation initiative is that everyone throughout your organization is fully aligned with the goals. This means you must have some sort of objective framework for prioritizing which business processes get automated, and in what order.
Business units or departments desiring to deploy RPA should be required to present their cases on the business impact of the proposed automation which will help RPA leaders to prioritize automation and schedule automation initiatives in a disciplined way.
Periodically evaluate and reevaluate automation decisions and share lessons learned
You also need to continuously talk to your business users to make sure processes have been automated in the right way. You have two possible ways to err with RPA: you can automate a good business process poorly (resulting in numerous errors), or you can competently automate a bad business process. Neither is good. First, you want to make sure the underlying business process is efficient and not holding the enterprise back because of residual inefficiencies from past legacy ways of doing things. The latter requires accurate error logging and making sure that when there’s a problem the right people are notified and a fix is immediately put into place.
Evangelize and celebrate RPA successes
Precisely because RPA can be a sensitive subject, you have to continually make the case for it, and evangelize it whenever you can. One of your key objectives is to educate employees throughout the organization and explain to them what RPA can and cannot do. Workers will always worry that RPA will take their jobs away. So, you need to be very clear and demonstrate to employees where and how RPA will be deployed, and highlight the advantages it offers to your human workers.
In Conclusion
As RPA moves into mainstream adoption, more companies are going to be looking for guidance on how to best apply this exciting technology. By following these eight best practices, you should have a head start on your RPA initiative.
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