Operationalising RPA
Part of the change-maker series
Team to Enterprise Scale
The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market is expected to reach nearly $2 billion globally by the end of 2021, an increase of almost 20% from 2020. This comes as no surprise as organisations look to technologies and strategies that will give them an edge over competitors. RPA offers a mechanism for obtaining this critical advantage.
The power of RPA lies in improved efficiency and lower overheads, as well as the capability to unleash the creativity of teams by freeing them from repetitive tasks to focus on more impactful activities.
RPA promises substantial savings, decreased monotonous work, with fewer errors and revisions. That’s why it is becoming increasingly prevalent across effectively every industry sector.
As RPA is a strategic program that supports large-scale deployment, you might be considering scaling your RPA initiatives across the enterprise. In this article, we’ve discussed some recommendations that can help you successfully operationalise RPA from team level to enterprise level.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Robotic Process Automation is the technology that enables you to set up “robots” to imitate and assimilate the actions of a person interacting within digital systems to implement a business activity.
RPA robots utilise the user interface to capture information and manipulate applications just as a person would. They infer, activate responses, and communicate with other systems to carry out a range of repetitive tasks.
For example, they can log into applications, extract structured and semi-structured data from documents, transfer files and folders, fill in forms, copy and paste information, scrape browsers, and more.
How to Operationalise Your RPA Initiatives from Team to Enterprise Scale
As scalability is among the key advantages of RPA, it seems obvious that many business leaders consider leveraging it at scale. Recent findings from a Deloitte survey support this view as 78% of the businesses that have already tried RPA, expect to significantly invest more into it in the next three years.
By 2024, large organisations are likely to triple the capacity of their current RPA portfolios and nearly 50% of all new RPA customers are predicted to come from organisational areas outside of IT.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can scale your enterprise RPA.
- Plan Strategically
Scaling isn’t only a matter of introducing more bots. It signifies a methodically planned rollout of robotic capabilities across activities, along with using new robotic capabilities such as Machine Learning to significantly drive efficiency across previously automated processes.
Scaling your RPA from team level to enterprise level needs a certain degree of foresight, operationalised in terms of medium and long-term strategic planning. For example:
- What are the SLAs you need to meet for a particular process?
- What is the impact to the business if that SLA is not met?
- What is the impact of looking at or subsequently not looking at high availability in terms of ongoing costs?
- What are the peak loads for a process and when do they occur?
- What is considered a task within a process?
It is important to acknowledge and address all potential difficulties along the way as they arise; as putting off a decision could mean a rebuild of an entire process or set of processes which can cause real hurdles in adoption or realising benefits.
- Focus on Governance
Scaling RPA across a large, distributed organisation can be challenging. However, these challenges can be mitigated when you follow certain ground rules and create the right technology partnerships.
The key to operationalising this at scale is governance, which will define where and how you’ll deploy robotics as well as how you collaborate closely as business and technology counterparts.
Start by identifying the activities that are to be automated. Avoid trying to automate the biggest business problem, the most complex processes or business critical processes as the first RPA initiative. In the beginning it is prudent to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit such as repeatable, well-structured and documented/mapped processes that can easily be automated.
Through establishing the right governance, you define the organisational criteria needed to plan ahead. It’s not just about managing risk, but also about identifying high-priority activities. By selecting the right processes to automate, you can scale the positive impact more quickly.
- Set Realistic Expectations
Scaling RPA boosts performance for the organisation and its people. When the transition is handled effectively, teams realise the benefits of RPA, they become keen proponents of it and they proactively build more automation into the processes they handle. Nonetheless, the continued support from business leaders to promote the deployment of RPA is key.
This means encouraging the industrialisation of processes where it seems reasonable and setting appropriate metrics and objectives around desired targets. Keep in mind that it’s not about the number of robots being used, but about the results they provide for your consumers.
So, you should focus on the quality of process output, not robotic executions. If you want improved quality and shorter turnaround cycles, you should set that as a target and encourage the implementation of robotic automation and process reengineering to accomplish that target.
- Leverage Machine Learning
Intelligent automation is key to remaining competitive and efficient. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence should be a focus area for all organisations to future proof their RPA. To start down this journey however requires some focus on the data and the machine learning models. Data integrity, representative source data, labelling all ensure that the robots are able to perform machine perception tasks i.e: field recognition, image recognition, etc. increase the reliability of the automation.
As the models, data and team proficiency improve over time, machine learning can be a powerful tool in the toolbox driving greater scale with greater surety of a reliable outcome.
Scale Your RPA Seamlessly With Tyme
Even with a solid understanding of purpose, many robotic process automation initiatives remain trapped at the project level, and have yet to be operationalised enterprise-wide operation. That’s where we can help.
At Tyme, our consultants can help you think deeply about where and when to apply RPA so that you can achieve the shortest time to value and greatest return on investment for your organisation. Together we can shape the investment across the candidates for automation and establish the core foundational principles for enterprise-wide automation.
We empower you to reduce costs and timescales for manually intensive tasks through the automation of rule-based transactional activities. We work closely with you to recognise data sources, explore use-cases, and define a business case for intelligent automation. This allows for informed decision-making to happen with minimal intervention, with a long-term view to mimic human judgement and decision-making capabilities.
Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you implement and scale RPA enterprise-wide.
