Robotic Process Automation: Monitoring Bots As a Necessary Step to Success
Your RPA initiative doesn’t end with bots deployment. You still need to monitor them. Here’s why.
You’ve decided to run an RPA initiative, picked the right vendor, employed Process Mining to identify the best candidates and, finally, deployed the bots. That’s it, right? Not so fast.
First of all, pat on the back for the approach towards the Robotic Process Automation project. There are still many that don’t include Process Mining as the first step to a successful and profitable automation of the processes. Why? Look for the reasons here, or download our e-book on how to get RPA right in 2019.
Let’s get to the point, though.
Having done everything right up until this point, don’t let the RPA initiative fail now by omitting the continuous monitoring of the bots.
Why Is RPA Bot Monitoring Important?
The business reality and experience pinpoints 4 reasons why you should be pumped on monitoring your RPA bots. Here they are:
1. By observing the bots live in production, you’ll uncover what was hidden before. As our product visionary, Michal Rosik, put it: “Review the processing and decisions made by the robot, early in deployment, and make corrections of rules and logic as necessary.” Just a slight change in the process might prevent the bot from working correctly. Bots’ event logs and their analysis with Process Mining will identify all the unwanted bottlenecks and bottleneck shifts, inefficiencies, control and data quality issues, and so on.
2. Even though you standardized and harmonized the processes before deploying bots into your IT systems, bots monitoring can identify room for continuous improvements of the processes running in your company. With monitoring, you can evaluate the bots’ performance compared to the original process, as well as check how it affects IT infrastructure (e.g. applications that were not ready for such a bot performance,…) or jobs being done manually.
3. As a stakeholder in an RPA initiative, you might also be interested in measuring the ROI of the project to be able to report the positive results or make necessary improvement measures. And the effectiveness of an RPA venture is best measured through bots monitoring as you can see the metrics for throughput times, continuous compliance checking, and various other.
4. In addition, keeping track of already deployed and active bots, you’ll also monitor your KPIs, while also taking immediate actions if the goals are not being met or you run into issues.
For RPA to run successfully within your company, it’s necessary to keep in mind that Process Mining is the right tool that matters at all stages of this initiative.
Be it the beginning when you try to find the right candidates for automation, during the deployment phase to check if the bot is running correctly, or — as mentioned before — in the post-deployment phase to monitor bots’ performance.
Monitoring Hybrid Processes, End-To-End
Today, more and more companies include bots into their operations, while also keeping the human workforce. The reason is that — at the current stage of development — RPA technology is used to automate single tasks instead of end-to-end processes.
Such a type of mixed processes is called hybrid processes, and if you want to find out more about them, be sure to check our webinar from IA World Series Live 2019 where our Product Visionary, Michal Rosik, talks about monitoring hybrid processes end-to-end.
What stage of RPA consideration is your company in? Have you already employed bots within your processes or are you only thinking about the option? Let us know in the comments or ping us and we’ll support you all the way.
