Level Up Your Strategy with Automation: Assessing Your RPA Automation

In the current world of AI, are you moving at the right pace?

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, staying competitive demands a strategic blend of innovation and efficiency. Automation has emerged as a game-changer, allowing organizations to streamline processes, enhance productivity, and optimize resource allocation. One of the critical components in this journey is MuleSoft’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a technology that has the potential to revolutionize how businesses operate. In this article, we delve into the concept of elevating your strategy with automation and the crucial role of assessing your automation.

Assessing Your Automation

We have learned, that MuleSoft RPA is an amazing technology, which allows you to automate your redundant daily tasks and save time money, and effort. But an assessment of the organization’s needs is imperative to justify the automation plan. We must check the automation plan against some criteria which best match the current organization scenarios. Some of them are listed below:

• Analyze Complexity: Evaluate the complexity of the identified processes. Some tasks may involve decision-making, and exceptions, or require cognitive skills.
• Quantify Benefits: Determine the potential benefits of automation for each identified process. This could include time saved, reduction in errors, increased throughput, and enhanced customer experience.
• Assess Integrations: Consider how RPA will integrate with your existing systems and technologies.
• Calculate ROI: Calculate the return on investment (ROI) for implementing RPA in the identified processes.

Now the question arises, how can we assess our automation? MuleSoft RPA has got you covered.

MuleSoft RPA Process Evaluation

MuleSoft RPA Process Evaluation is an in-built tool with MuleSoft RPA Manager, which allows us to propose, evaluate and approve business processes in MuleSoft RPA Manager. This out-of-the-box evaluator allows us to perform a rough financial analysis of the proposed RPA process. But, before we can evaluate the process we should create one! Let us step by step explore how we can evaluate our RPA process using MuleSoft RPA Process Evaluation.

1. The first step to creating an RPA is to create a new candidate RPA process from within the Process Evaluation view of the Process Evaluation module.

Process Evaluation module in MuleSoft RPA Manager

2. The next step is to give your RPA evaluation process a meaningful name, category, and description, which elaborates on the process.

Create Evaluation using MuleSoft RPA Manager

The next step is to evaluate your process. Let us move on to the next section to understand how we can evaluate an RPA process.

Process Evaluation

To perform the evaluation, we must fill out the evaluation criteria for the candidate RPA process. The evaluation is performed using three sets of criteria: costs, qualifiers, and benefits. The qualifiers and benefits are customizable and can be set using the Evaluation Criteria view of the Process Evaluation module. This gives the user flexibility to change and create their own qualifiers which need not fit in the created templates.

Costs

This criterion allows the user to evaluate the cost of the manual process to compare the manual processing with the automation process.

Criteria 1: Costs

Criteria 1: How to fill in Costs Criteria

Qualifiers

This criterion allows the user to determine the nature of work, the stability of the candidate RPA process, and the data type. So The user can see these values to identify the benefits of the RPA process. The predefined qualifier criteria are:

Criteria 2: Qualifiers

Criteria 2: How to fill in Qualifiers Criteria

Benefits

The third and final criterion assesses the benefits of the candidate RPA process. If the complexity of the process will provide any benefits. The predefined benefit criteria are:

Criteria 3: Benefits

Criteria 2: How to fill in Benefits Criteria

Outcomes

As we adjust the candidate RPA process’ Qualifiers and Benefits in the Evaluation Criteria view, we see a decimal number update accordingly to the right of the Qualifiers or Benefits section header title. The values are normalized so that the total in each category, before adjusting any of the criteria, is 2.0. The higher the value is (in the green zone) the safer it is to go ahead with the candidate process.

Process Matrix

Note: The Cost criteria are not an input for the Process Matrix.

Customising Process Evaluation Criteria

As discussed briefly in the previous section, aside from the pre-defined evaluation criteria, MuleSoft RPA allows the user to create their own Evaluation templates, comprising of different evaluation criteria, to evaluate the candidate RPA processes.

Create a new Qualifier or Benefit

We can easily create a qualifier or a benefit by navigating to Evaluation Criteria and selecting the correct option. After that, all we need to do is name the benefit/qualifier and define gradations.

Create new qualifier

Creating a new Qualifier

Create a new Template

Using the custom-defined Benefits and Qualifiers, we can create custom evaluation templates as needed to evaluate the candidate RPA process. To do so, Go to Evaluation Template, select Create, and then choose out of your custom qualifiers/benefits to create templates.

Create custom templates

Create custom template

So the next time we create an evaluation process, in the Template, choose your custom template to evaluate the new candidate process.

Conclusion

The automation ability relies on factors such as automation criteria and advantages, process expenses, time required, and frequency. It’s only through thorough process documentation and a comprehensive assessment that we can unlock the complete potential of RPA and create a scalable automation framework within the organization.