Intro
RPA has already made tremendous impact on businesses looking to add efficiency and save costs. RPA BOTs automate high volume, repeatable tasks within existing processes, thus freeing up employees to better utilize their knowledge to focus on high-value tasks that can enhance revenue opportunities. RPA is the fastest growing segment in the global enterprise software market. It grew over 63% in 2018 and is predicted to cross $1 billion in 2019.
Typical Pitfalls
Companies typically look at RPA to automate workflows and rule-based activities using structured data, but if businesses treat RPA as a magic pill or a silver bullet they have been waiting for, they ultimately find their journey to RPA – rewarding but slow.
Often, many businesses approaching us, estimate 80% of their work as deemed suitable for automation because, it is just rule-based with industry benchmarks being used to estimate the size of the prize, the evidence is just anecdotal from single data points. But as the work goes live, multiple issues surrounding roles, schedules and resource allocation can potentially arise regarding the actual running and managing these robots when the business processes are changed even slightly.
RPA is also incorrectly used sometimes to address operational pain points which are originally due to broken processes and lack of standard operating procedures which lead to longer BOT design times and discovery of new business scenarios during development, which result in reduction of scope or changes in cost-benefit ratios.
Ensure smoother RPA journey
Every RPA project at IMSS, irrespective of the complexity and size, needs to clearly define roles and controls. The RPA platform is only as good as the foundation it relies on and these foundations include virtualization platforms, network, hardware infrastructure, well-defined rules and processes etc., Weak foundations result in slower BOTs and may also need more number of BOTs resulting in higher costs thus skewing the cost-benefit ratio.
IMSS, in its projects also account for a cultural change readiness in customers at multiple levels which includes preparing them for implications in terms of roles that are no longer needed, as well as new roles that are going to be added. To realize the full potential of RPA in operational excellence, factors like waste elimination, process standardization etc., cannot be ignored.
And as it is true with any automation, RPA is a hybrid of business, process and technology which requires a lot of operational discipline, a technology platform to match and a perfect collaboration between business and technology teams.
