What is robotic process automation (RPA)?

Many mundane, repetitive employee tasks exist to ensure compliance with rules, laws and regulations. Unfortunately, repetition can breed inattention, and when human employees make errors, it’s often the business itself that suffers. RPA robots don’t get complacent; they approach every task with the same attention, significantly reducing the risk to the organisation. And because everything they do is monitored and documented; businesses are kept firmly in the loop regarding compliance with related regulations.

Human-led processes don’t only take up valuable time from employees, they can also be very expensive. RPA can reduce the wage bill wasted on simple tasks, while also allowing businesses to get more done in less time. As a result, RPA significantly reduces processing costs, often providing a positive return on investment within one year.

As businesses grow, additional RPA bots can be easily employed in parallel to address increased needs. They may be deployed extremely quickly and at relatively low cost, freeing up businesses to expand as far and as quickly as they are capable.

As previously stated, RPA bots don’t get tired, and they don’t make mistakes. They are also capable of moving through processes very quickly without having to pause. Together, these factors allow for more processes and tasks to be completed in a shorter amount of time.

By taking on the responsibilities of employees’ non-value-add activities, RPA allows talented workers to apply their skills in more-valuable tasks. Employees have the time and freedom to accomplish more, improving productivity across the business.

Because RPA takes the position of the user, rather than having to interface directly with system back-ends, it may be integrated with essentially any platform. This allows businesses to freely invest in and employ RPA, without having to worry about whether it will function with their already-established systems. At the same time, RPA empowers businesses to unlock the value of trapped legacy data in systems that were previously inaccessible.

Standard RPA can perform simple, rules-based tasks. AI-enhanced RPA robots can do even more. With the right AI technology, RPA can process unstructured data, recognise speech, apply machine learning models and natural language processing, and more. This makes it possible to automate not only repetitive tasks, but also higher-order, cognitive ones

Although there are different paths to incorporating RPA technologies in an organisation, many top companies follow a similar journey. This journey can be broken down into the following steps:

Organisations must first Identify and fully define their vision for incorporating RPA. This involves asking questions of employees and stakeholders to determine what business needs should be fulfilled by the RPA. It also includes speaking with other organisations (partners, vendors etc.) that may already be utilising RPA, to provide an insider’s perspective and help establish a roadmap towards digital transformation. Because RPA sits within a broader hyper-automation toolkit, the goal is to know when to apply RPA to the right business problem and when to apply other automation technologies to maximise business value.

The next step is to assign leadership roles, with the two most important being RPA sponsor and RPA evangelist. The RPA sponsor is the most top-level manager over RPA initiatives, handling most of the responsibility associated with budgeting, as well as establishing overall RPA strategy. The RPA evangelist takes the role of project lead, assigning other leadership positions, and aligning departments and business units to help identify high-value processes and criteria for RPA success.

Traditionally, consumer IoT devices are more difficult to manage. IoT device management facilitates effective governance of devices already deployed in the field, allowing organisations to send updates and patches, and to improve device functionality without negatively affecting the user experience.

Next, the organisation will need to develop a proof of concept and put it to the test. This includes the RPA business case, implementation model and any relevant assumptions. The proof-of-concept test will demonstrate within a closely monitored environment whether the assumptions were accurate and if the implementation model is effective. Although this is only a test phase, organisations are capable of learning more if the test processes relate to a range of systems and applications. Likewise, organisations will get more out of their tests if they eschew low-risk processes for ones that will have a more significant impact on business value.

With the proof-of-concept validated, the company in question can now deploy their RPA solutions in the real world of their everyday business operations. Assessing the performance of these RPA pilot programmes and comparing them to established success criteria and exit requirements, organisations can determine the actual benefit of employing robotic process automation. They can also make any final revisions that may be necessary prior to full rollout.

Organisations that are fully committed to RPA and digital transformation will next want to plan for full-scale adoption. To facilitate this, they may decide to create an RPA Centre of Excellence (CoE). The CoE will help establish and govern RPA best practices, standards, support, and tools and templates throughout the company. Simply put, the CoE becomes the primary resource for RPA expertise, helping business units establish and get the most out of their automations. However, essential though RPA is, it is only one of many automation-technology options COE may wish to consider when faced with specific use cases. In addition to RPA, businesses may utilise intelligent business processes powered by machine learning, advanced analytics and business process management (BPM). By relying on a complimentary combination of these and other tools, organisations can adopt a hyperautomation strategy to deliver end-to-end automation beyond RPA capabilities.

At this point, the organisation should be up and running with their own RPA solutions. The next step, therefore, is to expand upon those solutions and help the workforce begin to use RPA on their own. The CoE will take a lot of the responsibility here, guiding departments in employing bots, monitoring progress and using their expertise to further enhance RPA solutions.

With RPA fully adopted, the final, ongoing step is to continually monitor and refine. As businesses become more familiar and comfortable with robotic process automation, they will naturally be able to identify areas of improvement, creating a more effective approach to automation as they go.