Good Practices on Scaling RPA
Robotic Process Automation is revolutionizing business processes and has now become an essential part of any enterprise. According to a recent survey, more than 30 Lakh attended and unattended RPA bots will be running in 2020 and about 48% of businesses around the world are positive about increasing RPA adoption due to COVID-19. The biggest benefit of adopting RPA is that it helps employees to engage in more value-added tasks, removing the burden of performing mundane, repetitive tasks and therefore RPA is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software. However, an overwhelmingly large number of enterprises who have implemented RPA have not been successful in scaling the technology.
Many enterprises are facing challenges in scaling and making RPA a mature part of their operations. Even after successful Proof of Concepts and go-lives of the first few bots this has not led to expected returns in the long run.
No matter how transformative RPA as technology is, it is not the right choice for an enterprise if it does not scale to meet the requirements. For example, if an enterprise automates a core business process using RPA but is not able to scale it in case of business growing rapidly, the technology will become a bottleneck for the growth.
Many enterprises take up RPA initiatives without prior analysis and appropriate planning and as a result fail at automation due to the inability to identify the correct use cases for RPA adoption. Let’s look at some of the challenges encountered by enterprises in scaling their RPA initiatives.
Effective Business Strategy:
Robotic Process Automation has been traditionally seen as a quick win tool for achieving business benefits. Many RPA tools were set up with precisely this aim in mind and inherit design limitations when clients attempt to scale them to achieve bigger business goals. Enterprises often lack that holistic approach that ends up providing only short term benefits for the enterprise instead of desired long term benefits that can be achieved by focusing on scoping out the potential challenges that may arise with scaling RPA.
Choosing the Correct Processes:
The primary challenge that a majority of organizations face is zeroing in on functions that can really benefit from RPA. Enterprise-wide adoption of RPA can only happen when the initial set of processes that are automated gives the organization an indication of the transformative nature of the technology.
Cultural RPA Adoption:
Enterprises should focus on building a culture of accepting and working in tandem with technology.
Key Stakeholders Buy In
RPA automation projects must find support from key stakeholders within the organization who should see RPA as a strategic business initiative and provide the requisite financial and human resources.
Getting IT on board early
If the IT department is roped in early on in the automation process, they will see the need for change management and understand the need for robots to have access to the organization’s systems – and all the efficiency benefits of doing this.
Removing automation resistance in your business teams
There would be a lot of myths associated with the goals of RPA and therefore it is imperative to highlight how RPA can really enhance operations.The business would then take note of transformative capabilities of the technology and gradually understand that RPA will genuinely help employees utilize their time in more value-added tasks and not replace them.
All of the aforementioned challenges can be catered to only if you have a dedicated RPA Centre of Excellence taking care of all of these things to make your automation journey a success.
Building an RPA Centre of Excellence
After automating the first few processes enterprises generally get an idea of how to build bots. However, to scale up, enterprises need to consistently deliver high quality, new automation projects while maintaining the bots that are already in production. This is where Centre of Excellence come into play and provide research, quality assurance and leadership on how to automate business processes and tasks. There are 3 key areas of focus for CoE – Demand generation, Process Recognition, and delivery.
Demand Generation
The CoE should make Business and IT aware about RPA, its benefits and pre-requisites for its seamless implementation. The Initiative should generate enough interest to initiate process identification for RPA adoption.
Process Identification
The CoE can establish an approval process for automation opportunities that have been assessed based on the use case, potential ROI, potential benefits and complexity. This process results in the CoE to maintain a healthy and prioritized automation pipeline which becomes the source of work for automation delivery teams.
Automation Delivery
RPA COE should deliver secure, highly governed automation to the entire organization. The COE should build a process for deployment and a support process to maintain the bot once deployed.
Global Health Insurance Company Automates Back-Office Processes with RPA
A global health insurance enterprise established a Centre of Excellence to realize its internal vision of investment value derived from automation. Use case assessments, solution architecture, quality control and governance was centralized in the COE, while a training program enabled decentralized teams in building RPA capability for their business functions.
The insurance provider automated several key processes including member enrolment process, claims processing and healthcare product building. The systematic process discovery and automaton delivery helped decrease average handling time by more than 50% for all of these processes while enhancing efficiency and increasing cost savings by 40%.
Lessons Learnt from Setting Up the Centre of Excellence for RPA
- A successful COE and its structure and responsibilities depend on factors such as the industry and operating model of the organization.
- A COEshould be used to take care of all current and future RPA initiatives and its ownership should reside within the business and not any specialized function such as the IT.
- Establishment of the COE should be driven by the pace at which the organisation wants to expand its RPA delivery capacity.
- Organisations generally establish a centralized COE structure in the initial phase of their journey and gradually move to a decentralized structure
- RPA COE should facilitate the development of RPA skills for the enterprise.
While starting the RPA journey is quite easy, majority of enterprises struggle in scaling their RPA initiatives as there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for different operating models. Aligning your RPA vision with business and IT goals, choosing correct processes for automation and building the right culture for RPA adoption will require a dedicated COE team.