What is Digital Transformation?

Have you looked at how your competitors are doing business lately? Whether it’s automation or AI, conversations about digital transformation start as a way to be innovative, do better work, or solve new problems. In the constant battle to stay one step ahead of the competition, robotic process automation (RPA) offers a great first place to start with digital transformation to help you take a more innovative and efficient approach to your current processes.

Ready to get started? We’ll cover what digital transformation is, how RPA fits into your strategy, and discuss the common pitfalls companies encounter as they attempt digital transformation. Plus, you’ll learn how RPA can solve those problems and keep your company moving forward.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is when an organization brings in digital tools—like AI and automation—to transform the way they work. The goal of digital transformation is to be innovative, improve results, and solve new problems. But most of all, it's a way to keep up with competitors in a rapidly changing business landscape. This is done by taking a strategic look at your current processes to determine how they can be redone through technology to work smarter and better meet your business goals.

Take for example a company that has to compile data from files spanning multiple systems. Before digital transformation, an employee must log-on to the many individual applications—all with different credentials—and pull files from each to compile the data.

With digital transformation using RPA, a bot can automate file transfers from the disparate applications and compile the data into a single report. This allows the employee to spend more of their time analyzing and executing on the data instead of just collecting it.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation (RPA) software streamlines business and IT processes to reduce the burden on human employees. Software robots can manipulate and communicate with business systems and applications to power workflows across your entire enterprise.

How Does RPA Help with Digital Transformation?

RPA is an important tool for digital transformation that helps your organization work more efficiently. Much like with AI, it’s important to remember that RPA and digital transformation aren’t meant to replace human employees, but to help your workforce work in more innovative ways.

By using a team of digital assistants to help employees with their most repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks, they’re free to focus on more value-adding work. RPA bots not only streamline your processes to save time but also increase the accuracy of your work to cut down on costly errors. With a bot working alongside every employee, the possibilities for innovation are endless.

Digital Transformation Challenges and How to Tackle Them with RPA

Sometimes companies fail at digital transformation by forgetting that digital tools don’t equal business process transformation. Not all software or other digital tools will change the way people work for the better.

1. Focusing too much on “digital” and not enough on “transformation.”

Digital transformation isn’t just about buying any software tools. But about finding the right fit for your needs on the automation journey. Some ways to make sure that the tools you’re selecting will actually transform operations at your company:

• Before you choose a tool, learn how people work at your company. Find out what keeps them from being as productive as they could be, what manual processes get in the way.
• Choose tools that solve specific problems that your organization has in the way that will affect real change at your business. This will take time and discernment, but any tool that doesn’t solve a felt need at your organization won’t be used and won’t generate ROI.
• Find tools that can be implemented on a small scale before scaling across the business. That way you can test and tweak best practices and have better directions for business units as they adopt the new technology.

RPA is designed to make people more productive and help them get past repetitive, manual tasks. When implemented thoughtfully, employees will see the value of using an RPA tool, increasing adoption and generating RPA ROI quickly. And the right RPA tool will be easily scalable, meaning that you can start small to gain momentum and wins before implementing across the entire enterprise.

2. Poor communication within the business and with customers.

Even though the new technology you pick might appear to fit seamlessly into business operations at your organization, lean toward overcommunication. Those involved in choosing new tools are immersed in the benefits and innerworkings, but employees across the business won’t have that background information. When introducing new technology, sell it to your employees, presenting the reasons it appealed to company leadership and how it can transform the way they work for the better.

This shouldn’t just be one communication. Poor communication about new technology sinks digital transformation initiatives because tool adoption takes time and training. There should be realistic conversations about how employees can expect things to change, and those conversations should also extend to customers as is appropriate. Businesses hope that digital transformation will not only change the way that people at their organization work but also positively affect service or product delivery.  

For example, as you scale out an RPA tool from the first business unit to adopt to the rest of the business, provide use cases, bot templates, best practice guides, and a strong case for why RPA was the solution of choice continually throughout the first three to six months of usage. Recruit early adopters to share their experiences in learning and adapting to working with bots to build confidence with new adopters that RPA can bring sustainable, positive change.

3. Working in silos.

Businesses that don’t communicate across business units will fail at digital transformation precisely because it is intended to be transformative. Not only will you likely miss out on the opportunities to connect business units with the tool, but you’ll also become experts more slowly… or not at all.

As you implement new technology, set up regular checkpoints for representatives from different areas of the business to share what’s working and what isn’t. This will serve to help bring users up to speed at a quicker pace because they’ll benefit from a larger group of users’ experiences.

RPA helps to break down silos when fully scaled out because it connects business processes from different areas. And the right tool will have flexible, re-usable bots that can be shared and adapted for new purposes.

Getting Started for Digital Transformation Success with RPA

Addressing the common pitfalls organizations encounter when they attempt digital transformation will increase your chances for success on your RPA journey. Even more important is to start this initiative by implementing an RPA solution as the foundation. By transforming the way people work, RPA generates ROI, momentum, and quick wins that propel the rest of your digital transformation forward.