Overcoming the Barriers of RPA Implementation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) continues to be a top trend. Just ask industry watchers and technology decision-makers across industries and the globe. Grand View Research foresees the RPA market to show a compound annual growth rate of (CAGR) of 40.6% between 2020 and 2027. When it comes to RPA users, in a recent survey, 63% of technology decision-makers stated their organization is deploying or actively scaling RPA. Other surveys have shown a similar acceptance of the technology to automate, accelerate, and streamline businesses.

Even with RPA being a top trend with growing adoption, some organizations face barriers on their road to wide-spread implementation. To help you succeed, we have compiled six of the most common barriers and included information to overcome them.

Lack of RPA expertise/skills

RPA is an essential tool for all businesses going forward, and it can be learned in a variety of ways. Leading RPA providers offer online and in-person classes and certifications. Many partner with colleges and universities to extend learning programs to students. A variety of tutorials and how-to demo videos from vendors as well as users can also be found online. 

Another way to proceed: Look for an RPA provider with a no-code/low code platform design. That kind of platform makes it easy for all employees to build their own bots and help scale your automation initiatives faster.

Insufficient budget

Your company has made the investment in starting RPA, but to get more budget, you must show value. Explore every tool your vendor offers to help you deliver impact. Leverage their bot analytics tools to pull performance data to report out on success. If your numbers aren’t impressive yet, leverage other customer success stories to showcase what’s possible to your leadership if an additional budget is given.

You can also significantly reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO)—and gain many other benefits—by moving your automation to the cloud. At a fraction of the cost, this deployment option delivers on comparable value.

Lack of resources

Consider personnel resources. IT teams are always busy and stretched to capacity. But, if your business is like many, an untapped resource exists among your employees to help you make the most of automation. What is that resource? Your subject-matter experts or business users.

With a user-friendly automation platform, even employees who don’t have a technical background can learn to build bots to handle their processes. As a result, scaling is made easier with more resources. And your busy IT team won’t have to squeeze in more work by getting involved in bot development. With RPA in the cloud, IT can also remove automation infrastructure tasks from the team’s to-do list.

Limited cost savings/benefits

The cost savings and benefits of RPA, whether on-premises or in the cloud over legacy, manual solutions for business, are well documented. RPA can cut operating costs. In some industries, the savings can be significant. For example, according to KMPG, RPA can cut costs for financial services firms by 75%. Choosing cloud RPA over on-premises RPA can also result in more savings, removing capital and maintenance expenses.

RPA, in general, can have a high return on investment (ROI), with a break-even point of slightly under 14 months and an average ROI of 250%. Some companies have been able to achieve 375% ROI, according to the “Now & Next: State of RPA” report.

As for other benefits, RPA automates processes, accelerating and streamlining work and increasing productivity. It can reduce errors that are the result of manual processing. And automation frees up human workers for higher-value work and gives them the freedom to focus on innovation and problem-solving.

Organizational/employee resistance

Be transparent about your automation initiatives and articulate how it delivers value for the company. Involve team members in an automation initiative from the start and let them help you pinpoint bottlenecks in their processes. Use processes discovery tools to document workflows and identify additional automation opportunities, and get process owner buy-in before implementing. Lastly, make sure to share the successes of each deployment broadly to build trust and get other employees excited about automation initiatives.

Security concerns

For leading cloud providers, security is at the core of their business, and they make significant investments to offer maximum protection. Consider a platform that’s earned industry certifications such as SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, ISO 22301, and ISO 27001.

Depending on the provider, you can expect to see a variety of safeguards for the platform, its users, and the data that is being accessed. Features like multi-factor authentication and granular role-based access controls (RBAC) ensure that only authorized users get access to a segregated set of data that has been assigned to the user. End-to-end data encryption protects data in motion.

As for bot security, consider a provider that offers a program that validates and certifies the bots offered by the company and its partners to adhere to the highest standards for protection. 

Moving forward

Gartner forecasts the RPA market will grow at double-digit rates through 2024. Find the solution to your barriers and focus on scaling your RPA initiative and maximizing your ROI. To read more on how technology decision-makers are employing RPA and their strategies for the near future, access the “Now & Next: State of RPA” report. And check out the Automation Anywhere platform.