Good Practices in Building a Scalable RPA Centre of Excellence
Implementing RPA offers numerous benefits to the organizations viz., reduction in cost, fewer errors, optimized operations, better customer experience, quick implementation, and ROI. Because of these benefits,an increasing number of organizations are implementing RPA aiming to accelerate their digital transformation strategy. According to recent research, 63% of the respondents said that RPA is a major component of digital transformation.RPA is a highly scalable technology and organizations are realizing that they can reap greater benefits if they implement RPA enterprise-wide. But the majority of organizations are still struggling with scaling up RPA implementations.
Generally, organizations may start with their RPA journey with a handful of automation but as the RPA implementations start increasing and organizations try to scale up it leads to a set of challenges. The top challenges faced are as follows:
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Appropriate Process Selection
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Scarcity of Skilled Resources
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Siloed Approach
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Ownership
One of the most common challenges faced is the wrong selection of processes for automation. Some processes are better suitable for automation than others. Mainly processes that are structured, rule-based, high-volume, involve a repetitive manual input, and which do not require human judgment are good candidates for automation.
RPA deployment in your organization can get hampered if there are not enough skilled resources in your team.
Many times, businesses self-deploy RPA solutions. This piecemeal approach with limited involvement of IT or a central authority can lead to the solutions failing on matters of enterprise security and scalability.
If there is a lack of clarity amongst various teams with regards to their responsibilities in the new automated environment it can lead to a lack of ownership. Both business and IT teams need to work jointly on RPA implementations with properly defined roles.
Setting up an RPA Centre of Excellence (CoE) can prove extremely helpful in addressing all the above challenges. An RPA Centre of Excellence acts as an organization’s internal delivery capacity to effectively implement RPA solutions across the enterprise with tactical and strategic goals and helps reuse the accumulated knowledge in future implementations. RPA Centre of Excellence provides a structure to the implementations and helps streamline them. It also helps in planning for scalability. RPA Centre of Excellence is a combination of people, process, and technology that supports an RPA implementation across its lifecycle and acts as a go-to source of expertise. Let’s look at the good practices to be followed while building a scalable RPA Centre of Excellence.
Set up an RPA team
For implementing and managing RPA you need the right skills and capacity. You need a team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities who can work well together and with stakeholders. Following roles are recommended to be appointed:
- RPA Sponsor – This person should be from the business side whose foremost priority will be to establish RPA as an organization-wide strategic priority and will ensure corporate resources.
- RPA Champion – The RPA Champion will be responsible for driving the RPA adoption across the organization.
- RPA Change Manager – Their job will be to take care that the impacted stakeholders understand the changes that are happening and ease them into the new way of working. They will also create the change and communication plan in order to align all stakeholders with the organizational objectives.
- RPA Business Analyst – They will be responsible for creating process definitions and maps for automation.
RPA Solution Architect – They will define the architecture of the RPA solution. They will also help with the development and implementation phases. - RPA Developer – They are responsible for designing, developing, testing, and supporting the implementation of RPA solutions.
- RPA Infrastructure Engineer – They majorly give infrastructure support for server installations and troubleshooting.
- RPA Supervisor – They will manage and control the workforce in the operational environment.
- RPA Service Support – They will provide support during the RPA solution deployment.
Establish a Governance Model
A proper governance model creates a framework for cross-departmental collaboration. It also provides a structure to apply best practices during RPA implementation. It helps implement proper RPA standards, and policies. The governance model also takes care of frameworks and templates for change management. It provides guidelines for task prioritization and circulates performance and productivity metrics. An organization can choose to go for a Decentralized, Centralized, or Hybrid model for governance.
- Decentralized Model – In this model also called the federated CoE model, RPA implementations are carried out within individual business units across the organization. Each business unit oversees its own development process and builds its own capabilities. But in this model, it becomes difficult to collaborate with IT teams. And a lack of a shared platform can make it difficult to scale.
- Centralized Model –The centralized model is a top-down approach. Here the CoE looks after providing RPA capabilities and prioritizing processes for automation across the organization. With a centralized model, it is easier to achieve standardization and monitoring. Although as compared to the decentralized model, this model is more scalable at times it can get slower to distribute automation across the organization.
- Hybrid Model – As the name suggests this model has the features of both decentralized and centralized models. This kind of model is better suited for mature CoEs. Here the CoE centralizes operations while each BUdefinesits own demand and prioritization for automation. The hybrid model offers the scalability of the centralized model as well as better distribution capabilities of the decentralized model.
Enablement of CoE and scaling-up
To ensure success an RPA CoE can start by taking small steps at first but have the big picture in mind. A small start will act as a baseline for future projects and help you understand what organizational changes are needed. It is crucial to managing both resources and expectations while implementing RPA at the enterprise level.
Keep Learning and Improving
Key Performance Indicators should be determined and measured constantly. It is crucial to hold regular review calls to understand what is working well and what needs improvement. It is also important to create proper documentation of this which will prove beneficial for future implementations. There should be a growth plan in place to sustain and develop your organizational RPA expertise.
Keep Customer Experience in mind
It is important to keep the customer experience in mind while setting up RPA CoE. The RPA implementations should be simplifying processes and make them faster so that your organization can offer better customer service. Also, employees can engage more with customers since software robots are handling repetitive tasks.
A leading financial software company adopted the CoE method to deploy RPA in its organization. They were able to significantly reduce their processing time from 1-10 days to on-demand. By implementing a bot for verifying chargebacks they were able to save 745 hours. They implemented another bot for processing customer returns which helped them save 450 hours. Due to the implementation of CoE, they were able to optimize the processes before automating, collaborate effectively with the technical teams and ensure security.
In the next few years, most organizations will be working with a combination of digital workforce alongside human counterparts. RPA combined with other technologies like AI and machine learning further increases its value proposition for organizations. According to a recent report, the global RPA market size was valued at USD 1.89 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.8% from 2021 to 2028. The CoE identifies and owns the processes for RPA implementation while keeping business strategy in mind ensuring successful scaling-up. The RPA CoE will help people and automation work well together. Investing in an RPA Centre of Excellence today will ensure that organizations are ready for the future.