How Can You Ensure A Successful Rpa Implementation

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Among many things, the new economic realities underscore the imperative to do more with less for institutions across sectors. Currently, the urge to drive non-linear business growth, enabling customer experience delivery and optimized resource utilization, dominates the strategic focus of the decision-makers. The priorities are not misplaced as a recent survey found over 75% of employees apprehensive about the gainful leveraging of their skills and 40% of the knowledge workers wasting time on repetitive tasks. In respite, automation can redefine operational efficiency, with RPA solutions offering a simplified conduit for businesses to monetize its apparent advantages.

RPA solutions: Accentuating business productivity

RPA solutions form the building blocks of digital enterprises, employing software-defined automation to securely accelerate high-toil, time-consuming, low-value, yet indispensable tasks. Unlike conventional workflow automation tools that automate jobs using complicated API integration or backend scripting, RPA solutions develop action lists by shadowing user actions on the application GUI and mimics ...
... human operators. Such use cases for RPA solutions include customer servicing, invoice and sales order processing, payroll processing, refund management, data extraction, and much more, disengaging valuable workforce bandwidth for strategically essential roles. Despite economic pressure, RPA solutions are penetrating industry domains, with Gartner predicting double-digit growth through 2024. Sustaining the momentum, Deloitte found that 78% of the existing RPA customers will boost investments within the next three years.

A roadmap for success

While the relevance of RPA solutions to modern business interests is irrefutable, it is not without a caveat. E&Y, in one of its recent studies, observed that at least 50% of the RPA solutions deployment are either stalled or deprived of enabled outcomes owing to a lack of clear visibility into the enterprise automation goals. Irrespective of your industry, if you are embarking on an RPA solutions implementation journey, it may help incorporate the following milestones into your transformation roadmap:

Step 1 - Research and planning: Automation can have a defining impact on your business. So, rather than joining the bandwagon, the decision to embrace RPA solutions should be a deliberate and informed one. It would be best if you considered channelizing significant resources into discovering your unique automation requirements and readiness to adopt RPA solutions across enterprise functions. Here, alongside your standard primary and secondary research efforts, it is beneficial to adopt a Center of Excellence (CoE) approach to planning, with cross-departmental representation, unifying perspectives, ideas, opinions, and accountabilities into your RPA solutions implementation program.

Step 2 - Preparing for the change: Following the planning, it is advisable to position your organization for the upcoming shift. Your employees, at different phases of digital maturity, have their specific ways of coping with it. To facilitate the process, you can employ an RPA champion from your senior management team with clear visibility of the risks/rewards of the undertaking to train, educate and influence your employees into the folds of an RPA solutions-driven work culture. During this phase, it is also critical to identify the right business process with significant value for implementing the RPA solutions pilot and understand the practical challenges. It is vital to harbor realistic ROI expectations, factor in exceptions and seasonalities, and estimate whether the RPA solutions implementation contributes to your larger enterprise goals.

Step 3 - RPA solutions vendor selection: The dividends of your RPA solutions implementation project is entwined with the caliber of your RPA vendor. Therefore, it is essential to do an exhaustive study of the available options, the available expertise, product & service features and align them with your strategic and tactical goals. Reference for such studies may include tool capabilities and application, agility, solution architecting and road mapping strength, ecosystem availability, knowledge base, and AI/ML compatibility of the product. Key tasks during this phase involve use case finalization, RFP formulation, response evaluation, and the awarding of the pilot.

Step 4 - POC development: A Proof of Concept (POC) is critical to demonstrate the feasibility of your business case assumptions and ensure an evidence-based implementation of the proposed RPA solutions implementation across your enterprise. Your RPA CoE needs to consistently collaborate with the RPA implementation partner to ascertain that the solution is financially viable, operationally resilient, and universally relevant to your business challenges.

Step 5 - System Go live: Based on the inputs derived through the RPA solutions POC, your RPA experts can start rolling out the implementation and start its integration into your Business As Usual. The phase involves both unattended and hybrid automation scenarios and calls for close monitoring of the implementation and interventions as required. It is essential to consider the feedback from your internal and external stakeholders and the practical roadblocks that the solution encounters in runtime. Keeping all your business divisions attached to the actual automation experience may help derive more realistic implementation outcomes.

Step 6 - Plugging cognitive drive: Once the primary automation attributes are working to the satisfaction of your decision-makers, you can consider expanding your RPA journey by infusing smart technologies like AI and ML into the solution, progressing towards Intelligent Automation (IA) or Hyper-automation. In fact, in the wake of the COVID-induced disruptions, IA trends are gaining momentum worldwide to make companies agile, efficient, and resilient.

Step 7 - Scaling: Now, you can go beyond the sandbox, expanding the live RPA solution across your enterprise. The CoE should spearhead the effort, identifying the automation processes, defining the success factors, and orchestrating the digital workforce in collaboration with your enterprise IT outfit and business units. It is also within the purview of CoE to enforce operational Best Practices and derive the most from your RPA investments.

Step 8 - Adopting an RPA-driven culture - While implementing RPA solutions is easy, significant work lies ahead in integrating it into your corporate DNA. Far from being an instrument of cost-cutting and layoff, your employees should perceive automation as a means of affirmative change. Business transformation is the sum of technical progress and cultural shifts. It will only work if you are equally invested in your employees, helping them to meaningfully embrace the benefits that RPA promises.

Final notes

The steps mentioned above are pivotal to ensuring a successful culmination of your RAP implementation initiatives. Nevertheless, in case the scope and implications of the journey appear too daunting, you do not have to necessarily undertake it alone. Today RPA service providers like Percipere are available to take the burden off your shoulders. For instance, as a global UiPath partner and a full-cycle RPA innovator, Percipere's interventions range from Advisory, Consulting, Implementation to Incident Response, backed by well-laid plans and efficient change management program, to help you find the remedies for the most pressing operational challenges.