3 Steps to Successful RPA Implementation

January 31, 2018 | Technology

Businesses across verticals are keen to tap into RPA to make their operations more efficient, and customer experience more personalized. However, most companies are ill-equipped, and therefore anxious to kick-start their RPA journey.

Unlike other software upgrades, RPA implementation involves complex factors like organizational structure, enterprise-wide change management, and technology platform and partner selection; making it more of a strategic change rather than a mere platform upgrade or a new tool implementation.

Here is a quick 3 step guide to help companies successfully navigate the labyrinth of RPA implementation.

Platform and Deployment Model Selection

When choosing RPA tool, companies often tend to go with the price and popularity of the platform rather than its relevance to the organization’s needs; consequently, failing to achieve the target ROI. To make a more objective selection, businesses need to evaluate RPA platforms on the following factors:

• Platform’s scalability, speed, & security
• Comprehensiveness of analytics
• Flexibility of training module
• Simplicity of the UX design

As for the deployment, it primarily depends on the simplicity/complexity of RPA. For instance, desktop automation handles simple workstation tasks with human interaction; therefore, can be deployed internally. On the other hand, server level automation requires software robots to handle more complex tasks (interaction between applications, applying rule-based logics, etc.) with no human interaction; therefore, require more sophisticated deployment model, which needs to be executed with external expertise.

Also read: 3 Reasons You Should Implement RPA Sooner than You’re Planning

Organization-wide Process Assessment

An enterprise-wide automation is an exciting idea, but not always an ideal solution. Over-automation can result in costly maintenance requirements and negatively impact ROI. Therefore, prior to RPA implementation, an organization-wide assessment is essential to determine right automation opportunities that can improve workforce productivity and positively help in achieving the targeted ROI.

During process assessment, organizations need to consider following factors to come up with the optimum automation design:

• Volume (size/scale) of the process
• Number of exceptions and failure points
• Potential instances for decoupling
• Time/resources required in development and deployment

Skills Development and Talent Acquisition

Like any other digital transformation initiative, RPA implementation requires organization readiness. This involves creating the right structure within the company to align everyone with the RPA strategy. To achieve that, organizations need to take following steps (all or any combination based on the complexity of the RPA implementation):

• Train teams on new skills
• Hire someone experienced
• Partner with a technology firm with relevant expertise

This approach also allows organizations to manage cultural shift more seamlessly, since employees are equipped with required technical expertise and change management skills for new type of processes such as development, configuration, and reconfiguration of software robots.

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Concluding Notes

In spite of careful planning and calculative steps, some initial hiccups are inevitable with your RPA implementation. A good way to minimize their impact is to start with a limited number of processes, track their performance, and analyze instances that can be implemented better. With these new findings, you will be able to generalize a sounder RPA deployment strategy organization-wide that will assuredly take you closer to the expected ROI.

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