What can your BPM Team do Today to Successfully Deliver RPA
Delivering on the promise of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will be a challenge most organizations will not successfully overcome in 2019. This is mainly due to the underestimated governance and process re-design efforts involved in successfully implementing and scaling RPA to achieve the planned ROI. Business leaders must focus on involving Business Process Management (BPM) teams to ensure RPA projects succeed at scale.
It seems that 2019 is the year of the robot. Business leaders around the world have kicked-off projects to introduce Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with the hope of quickly reducing costs and freeing-up time for their employees to spend more time on value-adding tasks and less time on repetitive menial tasks.
Although automation has been around for centuries, it is only now, with the rise of RPA, that automation has made it to the hands of business leaders who no longer depend on their IT function to begin using RPA tools. This ability of the business to implement RPA tools brings great opportunity for business users to transform their own processes, but also carries great risks, including that — according to Gartner’s Predicts 2019: RPA Evolution report —
“40% of enterprises will have RPA buyer’s remorse due to misaligned, siloed usage and inability to scale” through 2021.
Why is RPA a Challenge?
RPA is seen by most people as a convenient technology that allows business stakeholders at large organizations to independently and without involving IT, utilize no-code-required tools to automate simple, repetitive tasks. By configuring software robots to interact with existing systems, companies can reduce efforts on the manual interactions employees have with systems without requiring a whole IT project to make changes to the core systems themselves.
Most teams that begin their RPA journey ask themselves the following questions:
- Which process can we most easily automate?
- What kind of ROI can we expect after implementing RPA?
- How much time will we now save in doing this process?
The problem with those questions is that they do not question the current state of the process or if this process is optimized to a level where automation would have a positive effect. As Bill Gates said,
“automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency”.
What RPA Teams SHOULD be Asking
- How automated are our current processes?
- Is this process optimized for automation already?
- How would RPA change the process as a whole?
- What improvements can the customers expect?
- Is the to-be process improving the average cycle time and/or reducing costs?
- Are new controls needed to mitigate the risks RPA creates in the process?
- Are we still compliant to regulatory requirements?
- Do we have new process paths to do exception handling?
These are exactly the types of questions your BPM teams have been built to answer. Most of the process analysis and project delivery skills involved in successfully automating processes in an organization still lie within the Business Process Management (BPM) teams an their ability to collaborate with IT. BPM teams are also well equipped to identify automation opportunities where other technologies, rather than RPA, may be better suited to deliver the desired results. This gives RPA a more focused implementation scope that ensures the right investment is being made as software robots are introduced.
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BPM Supporting the Scalability of RPA
Given the ease with which RPA tools can quickly deliver a prototype, or even a working robot in a matter of hours, organizations can be lead to hold false expectations as to the overall effect the technology can have on the enterprise as a whole. The resulting siloed implementations of RPA can fall short of expectations when error handling, exceptions handling and monitoring controls are not accounted for. The governance that BPM brings with it as a management practice, along with the supporting tool set, can guide organizations towards RPA success. It is therefore important for RPA implementation teams who look to avoid the pitfalls of a lack in governance to follow the guidelines below:
- Choose the right process to automate by identifying those with high frequency, low complexity and high business value.
- Kick-off a project for every Process you intend to apply RPA to
- Design your To-Be Process before implementing it
- Focus on Simulating the Target Process and track KPIs that will be affected
- Plan for exceptions handling in your TO-BE process
- Build new controls to monitor RPA into your process
Final Thoughts
Although it is clear that RPA has picked up traction worldwide and that the value it can deliver is hard to compare, it must be seen as an intermediate step or short-cut towards a more automated way of working. As organizations begin to understand the capabilities and limitations of RPA by designing ideal future processes, organizations will be able to make more long-term decisions on a more robust automation strategy. In the meantime, BPM teams that are ready to answer the key questions around automation will be able to guide RPA teams to best leverage the technology and lay down a roadmap towards RPA success.
- Stephanie Stoudt-Hansen, Frances Karamouzis, Arup Roy, Arthur Villa, Melanie Alexander. (2018, December 6). 2019: RPA Evolution. Gartner.
- Cathy Tornbohm. (2018, June 27). Robotic Process Automation: 8 Guidelines for Effective Results. Gartner.
- Nick Ostdick. (2018). The Evolution of Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Past, Present, and Future. Retrieved from
https://www.uipath.com/blog/the-evolution-of-rpa-past-present-and-future
