Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

What is your vision for digital transformation?

Determining your readiness for RPA (the next step on the RPA journey) is closely tied to your organization’s approach to digital transformation.

If you’re starting the process, ask lots of questions–both internally and externally. Reach out to trusted partners, vendors, and other organizations already on their RPA path to inform creating the vision of what your organization looks like during and after digital transformation.

Success tip: Put people at the center of your plans. Involve a broad cross-section of stakeholders and bring HR to the table early on. People, at every level, are ultimately your change agents and RPA champions.

Who will your RPA leaders be? And what will you automate first?

There are two critical leadership roles to fill: RPA sponsor and RPA evangelist. The RPA sponsor is your senior-level automation champion. This person has budgeting influence. The RPA evangelist is your project lead. This person will align leaders across business units and departments to determine the right business processes candidates for automation.

Set up your RPA proof of concept and/or pilot for success by targeting processes for automation that have high business value and defining success criteria before you start automating.

Evaluate and select your best-fit solution and support model

The golden rule? Think long-term. RPA, or more broadly, intelligent automation, is a fast-moving market. A vendor that will be relevant as an ongoing partner will have demonstrated experience and stability, and be invested in continuing to adapt and innovate.

Looking ahead to RPA expansion and achieving digital transformation goals, RPA can only be successful at scale when your workforce is empowered to automate on their own. You’ll need to choose RPA software that’s not only be technically powerful but also exceptionally intuitive.

Test your RPA business case, implementation model, and assumptions—in your unique business context.

The value of your RPA proof of concept is in seeing if your business case assumptions were accurate and proving out your implementation model.

Reminder: pick a process to automate first that has significant potential for gains through automation, and not a process that’s lowest risk. Bonus points if the processes touches as many business technology systems and applications as possible.

Test RPA in the real world of your business operations

Post-PoC, the next step in the RPA journey is putting an automated process into everyday operation.

Your RPA pilot will follow the implementation model as defined in your PoC, and you’ll assess the performance of the RPA pilot against predefined success criteria and specific pilot exit requirements. Now is the time to ensure you are including people. Learn from everyone’s experience of the RPA pilot to ready your roll-out for widespread RPA adoption.

Establish your global center for RPA standards and oversight.

Plan for full-scale RPA adoption by creating a global CoE focused on effectiveness and governance.

Your CoE will be in charge of creating standards, and propagating best practices, tools and templates, that support business users who create bots. The CoE has concentrated RPA expertise to assist business units get up and running with building and optimizing their own automations.

Create ongoing momentum, and extend and deepen the use of RPA across the organization

Here is where your selection of intuitive-to-use RPA software will really shine. Expanding RPA as an end-to-end solution relies on your workforce using RPA on their own.

With guidance from the CoE, business units and departments start up bot building functions that will be the day-to-day engines of automation. The CoE will focus on monitoring progress, establishing best practices, promoting successes, and continuing to enhance resources and expertise.

See the results of engaging everyone in RPA

RPA is a major enabler for digital transformation, not only by providing an accessible way for business processes to become more “digital” but by changing the human work experience and setting the stage for more complex and intelligent augmentation and transformation of business.

Automation as an embedded part of work life—part of your organization’s DNA—means digital siloes are a thing of the past, and processes of increasing complexity can be automated, with people adding value by applying human creativity and invention to solve new problems.