In the current Technology landscape and terminology, talking about bots is always fascinating. There are various kinds of bots that you could use in your business from a chat bot, WhatsApp bot to talk to a customer; an actual robot doing physical tasks and something which automates your routine repeatable back end tasks. Today in this article I’ll talk about Robotics Process Automation (aka RPA), what is it, when you should look to use it and how to go about it. I’ve also included some use cases for specific scenarios where this can come in handy.
What is Robotics Process Automation (RPA)?
Simply speaking, RPA is the application of technology that allows people to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems. Robots are trained and configured by business along with their tech teams. The time between the identified process change and its realisation is dramatically shortened by the use of the RPA bot. These bots are capable of any rule-based activity in any system.
RPA bots are highly capable to do repetitive rule based tasks freeing up your crucial resources to do much higher order tasks. RPA can be applied cross functionally and across softwares of many kinds.
It is however important to note that RPA is generally not an Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot.
When should you consider to use RPA?
For most organisations across the world, the most crucial resource is a human and you should not be wasting your critical resources on tasks which are highly repetitive and non-judgemental. Instead these resources can be trained and used for more effective tasks requiring judgement, interpretation, interactions and complex decision making. RPA is the right answer here.
Another reason to consider RPA is to remove errors resulting from a fatigued mind as the bot you implement would just never get tired of doing its tasks!
RPA applications can run 24X7, all through the year giving you much higher throughput eliminating human errors.
RPA bots can give you both productivity improvement and operational efficiency:
- Improved Quality with 100% accuracy
- Ability to scale several x with multiple bots
- Higher throughput and efficiency
- Improved service delivery and better customer experience
- Optimised operations
- 100% compliance with audit trails
I’m sure you connect with few or all the above points to consider RPA in your own business.
What kind of processes to pick for Automation?
While RPA can give you many benefits, it is important to pick the right processes for automation. This rule set helps you set the right expectations within the business and bring the best ROI on your investments
The process to be automated using RPA should be :
- Voluminous – You really need a decent volume to automate it. Ex there is no point automating something which takes couple of hours every month. Pick something which gets done every day by one or many resources
- Rule based – The bot needs to be trained using certain rule sets, if the rule sets are infinite then that may not be a RPA candidate. Pick something which has a finite small number of deterministic rules in the process
- Repetitive – You should ideally stabilise your process and make it repetitive so you don’t have to change the bot several times
- Digitised – The process would need to be digitised before it can be given for RPA implementation. Although you do get blended applications like OCR (optical character recognition) along with bots nowadays to even use paper in RPA applications, but the actual bot only picks it once the characters are digital
Business Benefits
There are several benefits you can get from your robotics process automation and I do suggest you look further than just FTE reduction to build a more holistic picture. Some of these benefits include :
- FTE Reduction or Avoidance
- Process cycle time reduction – better time to market or better time to response
- Improved compliance to avoid costs such as fines and brand image impacts
- Improved customer experience with 100% accuracy
- Improved employee morale with meaningful jobs
Approach to implement RPA
I’ve led implementation of several bots and bagged many innovation and implementation awards using RPA Technology. The following approach is something that has worked for me and is largely drawn from this article so far :
- Step 1: Process selection
- We ran multiple business stakeholders workshops to create a repository of all processes which could be possibly automated
- We prioritised based on ROI derived from volume, stability and rule based
- Standardised each process and took a sign-off from all stakeholders
- Step 2: Implementation
- We followed scrum methodology to develop, iterate, test and release involving all business stakeholders appropriately
- Created a support team to transition after deployments so the actual engineers could continue to work and automate more
While this approach is great from a process and technology point of view, I suggest you also consider the people aspect in this digital transformation journey. It is important to keep a leadership view on which employees may be impacted from the automation and work with your HR teams to either re-calibrate them towards other work parcels or help them in the transition out.
Conclusion
As you can see there are several benefits of introducing and scaling RPA applications in your technology stack. The process of selection, standardising and implementation can be daunting, however with right resources you can get it to work for your business and derive multi-fold ROI.
For any questions, to brainstorm your ideas or help with implementation you can reach me on mohit@moonshotscaling.com.
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