Unlock the Real Value of Robotic Process Automation
We are living challenging times with a pandemic accelerating a natural Digital Transformation in many organizations. Now the Digital Business Transformers are surfing the waves without stop, without the ownership of inducing why Digital is so important to the business. Robotic Process Automation represents a key piece of the puzzle to protect business and the pandemic helps to demonstrate the competitive advantage of having “Operational Elasticity”.
In this article, I’ll try to share my vision about critical success factors to unlock the real value of RPA in organizations:
1. RPA DNA
There are many ways to approach where or not we could capture value through automation and, fortunately, technology is evolving a lot to simplify the acceleration and scale of automation initiatives. Technology is key, but the real value is achieved when RPA is completely impregnated in the organization making part of the DNA:
a) Top management will understand quickly the financial advantage of RPA and later the “Operational elasticity” also. A pragmatic and startling message about the value of RPA could be: “if we turn off robots, the company will need to hire low qualified people, invest money and that process will take time”. EBIT is directly impacted by RPA, so we need to have a clear financial measurement of the net result, where it is very important to measure the conversation ratio of money invested in RPA versus business outcomes. Even though, we know that efficiency, effectiveness, and enablement should also be considered.
b) Managers will look for automation as part of their workforce (not only the human) in the way that operations work. If they recognize the value, they will invest and give time to people to think. Their teams will be better prepared to know about how to improve the operational performance and run to achieve their automation goals.
c) Business users will be motivated to contribute to the future way of work and transform the business in a more intelligent way: “useful people for useless work”. We could have better technology and a very interesting governance model, but if we do not impregnate RPA we are counting down.
What is your experience around RPA impregnation?
2. Continuous Growth
Do you believe that intensive farming is sustainable? In RPA the concept it’s the same, so we could create centralized CoEs with lots of harvesting in the beginning, but then, we are running out of “Process Land” and the global business outcome of RPA will be compromised. It’s like a finite game!
If we want to impregnate RPA and create a long-term Digital Workforce, we will need to prepare our “RPA eco-system” with all conditions to feed the “Process Land” in a continuous growth approach. There are two key parts of this strategy from an organizational point of view:
a) Having a central RPA team with the expertise to spread the best practices, RPA coaching, and manage the automation portfolio. Could act as RPA incubator or kick-starter for new departments that are starting RPA and manage subcontracted resources to deliver RPA maintenance services. It is also an important interface with IT, Security, and Auditing teams. This team is also the enabler of innovation with the research for new technologies.
b) Having trained champions in the operational teams that will be the pivot with the central team and acts with controlled freedom to develop and maintain robots according to the general guidance defined centrally.
With a good orchestration between the above teams and the right top management sponsorship, there is a high probability of impregnating RPA, which promotes continuous growth in a natural way.
It’ll take time in the beginning but after that, the results will demonstrate that “turbined” bots are going live. There is the main difference between requesting RPA development to another part of being part of it. When business users have that opportunity, they will focus a lot on the real value and not “ask for ask”. They will move fast to improve or change the solution after going to production. Many times, it is the difference between working in days or weeks. Focus is also essential to have a well-balanced automation portfolio: fewer bots delivering more value (I name it Process Automation) instead of having a lot of bots delivering little value (Task Automation).
What about your farm, do you sense that is feeding or running out?
3. People engaged sowing the change
Time and diversity are crucial to engaging people in RPA initiatives.
Decision-makers will need time to perceive value and understand that they will need to provide time to the operational engagement happen. Business users will also need time to learn about the concept, how to use the technical RPA tool and work very near with the process owners/specialists.
Every department will have their own pace in RPA adoption, so we only need to prepare an RPA readiness approach to manage different levels of maturity and specific action lines to grow.
A high value in the short-term is the role model. The problem is that top management and operational teams will only look to RPA in an opportunistic way and they will not be aligned interests that compromise long-term goals.
What about your RPA governance model, is it a Push or a Pull model?
4. Look sideways
RPA was a big jump in business transformation through digital but sometimes value is not coming only from RPA and we need to integrate it with other technologies like ChatBot, AI, BPM, or Process Mining. Looking sideways will help to unlock value in more complex or different challenges. We should not be restricted to RPA technology because Digital Transformation will challenge us thinking about how to promote a business autonomous environment. It’s very important to have a clear and updated vision about how the right tools will fit with a specific solution, which is not an easy task when we are seeing a technological broadcast of many solutions appearing in the market.
How many initiatives do you have with RPA integrated with our technologies? Are you prepared for the next jump?
All-in-all it takes time to unlock the real value of RPA, even if we have a good sprint in the first-year experience, the global evaluation about the benefits should happen later. I will let you this final question about your own evaluation:
How do you see your RPA portfolio increasing? in a natural way or needing high effort?
