The RPA Journey

READINESS

Choose your key RPA leaders: RPA sponsor and RPA evangelist.

Your RPA sponsor is the senior-level champion for RPA within the organization. This person has budgeting influence.

Your RPA evangelist is your project lead—this person connects leaders from relevant business units or departments to align and determine the right business processes for automation.

Identify business process candidates to automate first.

The best processes to begin with for RPA carry high business value. Avoid low-risk/low-reward examples which will make proving the business case for RPA very difficult.

Define success criteria.

What problems do you need to solve? What gains are you looking to make? Setting the right desired outcomes at the beginning sets up the entire RPA journey for success. Some example RPA success criteria/goals:

• Cost savings
• Increased compliance
• Higher productivity
• Improved employee engagement
• Competitiveness, agility
• Increased business process accuracy

RPA VENDOR ENGAGEMENT

RPA vendor selection and engagement

• Think long-term. Markets and business models are rapidly evolving. When choosing an RPA vendor partner, look for proven experience and a commitment to adapt and innovate as technology advances.
• Prioritize the user experience. Evaluate not only capabilities but ease of use. RPA will be successful when the business user is empowered to automate on their own. That requires the RPA software to not only be technically powerful but also exceptionally intuitive.
• Plan to ask for help. Look for a comprehensive RPA support model that puts your success at its center.
• Security is paramount. RPA interacts with your systems and sensitive data. Scrutinize security claims and ask question—only accept verified, enterprise-grade, secure RPA platforms.
• Consider RPA at scale. RPA is perfect for smoothing capacity spikes—if the technology is ready to scale at a moment’s notice.
• Recognize the necessity of continuous learning. Carefully evaluate the training and opportunities to deepen RPA knowledge.

PROOF OF CONCEPT

What’s the purpose of an RPA PoC?

The value of a PoC is to put RPA to the test for your unique business context and needs.

RPA is already a proven technology. But can it solve your business needs? A valuable PoC will put your business case assumptions to the test and validate your implementation model.

How do you identify the right process to automate for your RPA PoC?

Pick a process that offers significant gains and touches as many major technology systems and applications as possible.

RPA PILOT

Create a successful RPA trial run.

With the RPA PoC out of the way, the next phase in the RPA journey is to pilot RPA within the business. That is, putting an automated process into everyday operation. The RPA pilot will follow the implementation model you’ve chosen—the requirements, design, and testing.

Evaluate the performance of the RPA pilot against the predefined success criteria and specific pilot exit requirements.

Ask for feedback. Get ready to scale by learning from the people involved, both internal and external stakeholders. Seek to really learn from the RPA pilot to inform all aspects of preparing the organization for widespread RPA adoption.

RPA CENTER OF EXCELLENCE (CoE)

The RPA CoE is fundamentally your RPA A-team—both professionally and technologically. The CoE acts as the hub for RPA implementation and adoption. It offers concentrated RPA expertise to all business functions, along with a configured and fine-tuned development environment.

The RPA CoE is pivotal to scaling RPA across the organization.

Governance is another major aspect of this phase of the RPA journey. Ideally RPA governance is a joint effort with IT.

EXPANSION

The RPA expansion phase is about extending and deepening the role of automation across the organization. To drive this expansion, the CoE will communicate success and goals for RPA implementation, optimize the Digital Workforce, identify and qualify business processes for automation, establish best practices, and continue to grow the team’s resources and expertise.

Pre-configured bots and Digital Workers are another resource to help rapid RPA scaling.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

RPA becomes part of your organizational DNA. Automating increasing complex processes changes the nature of work for your people and your business. RPA is a major enabler of 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.