3 Top Tips for Successful RPA Adoption

Without proper strategy and planning, it’s almost impossible to guarantee success for any business initiative—especially implementing new software. Robotic process automation (RPA) is no exception. RPA solutions let people, robots, and disparate applications and systems come together seamlessly to achieve an efficient, scalable, and flexible enterprise.

Many businesses are eager to take advantage of this transformative technology. But rushing into automation without an effective strategy leads to disappointing results and even failure. Before you get too deep into your RPA journey, it’s important to understand the people, processes, and infrastructure needs that guarantee successful RPA adoption. Keep these three important tips at the top of your mind as you get started.

1. Put People First When Working with RPA Bots

You may be transitioning to a digital workforce, but your human team is still the key to a successful transformation. Putting together the right cross-functional operations team lays the foundation for your Automation Center of Excellence (COE). Most companies have islands of automation—individuals using automation tools to make their jobs easier. But to successfully adopt and scale RPA, you need to find where automation is happening—and where it is not—and make a plan to bring it all together as one project through your automation COE.

Your initial COE team may start with just one or two people, ideally someone with business skills and someone with technical skills. Once initial success is achieved, your RPA team members can start reaching out to the various departments to ask what sorts of work they are doing regularly for 30 minutes or more each day where automation might help.

The core team members in a proper automation COE come from three backgrounds—business analysts, IT, and operations. The business analysts document the process and assess the impact, IT builds out the automation in the most efficient way possible, and operations is involved in testing and monitoring production to ensure all is well. Then this COE committee reviews automation opportunities, prioritizes new processes, and determines if there is enough RPA ROI and time saved to move on.

2. Understand the Best Processes for RPA Adoption

As the COE team starts looking to adopt RPA across the organization, you’ll learn that not all processes are created equal. Some processes can’t be fully automated, but there is still some level of automation to be achieved. A fully or partially attended process means that the process must be watched and possibly interacted with at certain points. Transactions must be visually verified before completion or possibly a credential such as a captcha or keyfob security value must be entered for the task to continue.

In these types of tasks, the idea is to reduce overall transaction time by finding parts of the process that can be automated, like screen navigation through web browser automation, data entry, or duplicate data elimination. An example ROI for this type of task might mean that a team can process two to three times more work with the same staff level so the business can grow faster.

Unattended tasks are background workflows that can run without user input and can be scheduled to run on a regular basis without user intervention. These may be a combination of user interface driven applications and API driven components such as file transfers and reading input from a database or an Excel or CSV file. Another example is receiving an email and triggering custom processing.

Whether your process is attended or unattended, there’s always room to streamline, no matter your RPA approach. But identifying the right processes that will bring you the highest ROI is key in ensuring your RPA project is successful. Keep in mind that as you expand your automation footprint in your organization, the time will come to automate a mix of the different types of workflows. Develop best practices to make sure that you can re-use your automation by breaking your processes apart into re-usable portions to save time creating workflows.

3. Know the RPA Infrastructure Needed for Scaling

Your COE is only as good as its technological foundation. Making good choices about systems and infrastructure sets the stage for rapid growth and prevents issues down the road. If you follow the same development best practices for your automation as you would for your other critical systems you’ll be on the right path—test everything, monitor usage and changes, and measure and evaluate results.

If your automation solution will eventually be running key processes across the entire enterprise, it’s critical to protect it from downtime with high availability and disaster recovery for more resilient RPA. It’s also important to consider that as your automation efforts grow, there will be more and more employees needing access to the automation tool. Make sure you have role-based security in place so that employees only have the access they need. Some may need to execute workflows but shouldn’t be able to edit them, while view-only access will be adequate for others.

The more people using your automation tool, the more necessary it is to have audit logs of everything created, edited, or run. A high volume of automated processes also requires robust error handling and notifications. All tasks and workflows should be designed to report on failures with real-time notifications so that issues can be resolved immediately.

Training is also a critical piece of your COE infrastructure. An RPA solution is more than just software. Look for a vendor that offers robust RPA services and training. Training gives you the knowledge to get more use out of the application and give you a quicker return on your investment.