In pursuit of accelerating your organization’s digitization efforts, it’s always better to check and onboard the right RPA platform. The number of options available in the market can often become overwhelming and confusing. That’s why we’ve rounded up 10 factors to consider while choosing the right robotic process automation platform which can make a significant impact on the success of your RPA initiatives:
1. Establish clarity on why you are implementing RPA
Why choose robotic process automation software out of the plethora of technologies available? Think about “why RPA.” What exact goals and criteria do you have in mind? Are you looking to reduce full time equivalent (FTEs)? Increase throughput? Enhance task level productivity? Improve end-to-end process cycle time? Often, a broader process management need is disguised in the form of problems associated with task-level productivity.
2. Understand if broken processes are the real problem
Robotic process automation software isn’t built for fixing broken processes and silos within an organization. If you have situations where you have disjointed or mismanaged processes, it’s a case for broader business process automation (BPM) approach. No matter how well you optimize and automate human activities in such processes, you won’t achieve results without streamlining the overall process. In other words, your process must be well-defined, structured, and mature to implement RPA effectively.
3. Identify the right processes
Yes, it is one of the most critical factors. Prima facie, a set of structured, human-error prone, repetitive, and voluminous tasks warrant automation. However, it’s easy to get lost in the general characteristics of processes and lose sight of specifics. For instance, even if certain activities are repetitive and structured, if they are liable to change too often, the effectiveness of RPA platform would get nullified. Get very specific on process and task characteristics.
4. Measure and simulate – Know how you will benchmark the process
The ability to measure the key process parameters is important. You should be able to measure the overall cycle time, throughput, and task level attributes in terms of how they impact the business performance. At the same time, you should be able to simulate the process with various ‘what-if’ scenarios and assess if the proposed improvements from RPA would really impact business performance to the predicted levels. Not only this, it’s also important to ensure the automation is beneficial and doesn’t end up being nullified due to uncertain bottlenecks in future.
5. Account for exceptions in the process
Exception handling is one of the most critical elements that determine the effectiveness of a solution. Typically, in RPA software, the ability to handle exceptions – arising from a failure of a bot or an unusual situation – is limited to reporting and a default fall back option. In such situations, a process or a transaction break leading to broader systemic issues. You need to support RPA platform with a process level exception handling mechanism through a BPM platform that can seamlessly define a fallback option in the form of human intervention or through rules management. In fact, operationally, it is necessary to have exception handling through a process management solution before RPA software can be implemented effectively.
6. Establish visibility to facilitate administration of process and bots
Dealing with few hundred bots is still manageable without elaborate monitoring mechanisms. But, when scale increases (where the real benefits accrue), you need a robust and scalable monitoring. You should be able to monitor at process level to track what’s happening in the system. Such monitoring should include human activities, bot statistics, exceptions, queue monitoring, process level and queue level alerts and overall process statistics.
7. Weigh in the requirements from auditing, security, and compliance
In a process, activities are distributed among humans, bots, and backend systems. Some exceptions also end up being managed by humans. Without a broader process management mechanism (such as the one provided by BPM), the compliance teams would have to access data from multiple systems and link them together. In a BPM-based RPA platform, all audit trails (including user-level, bot level and most importantly, item level) are available through a single system. From security standpoint too, it’s important to treat bots as an important element that needs to be monitored and logged.
8. Consider horizontal and vertical scalability
Scalability is another area that requires to be considered beyond just task level multiplication. The real impact of robotic process automation comes from vertical scaling through bot cloning upon the increase in volumes. If you have a BPM platform that managed the process at an elevated level, you get options of realigning and rearranging the process by splitting it and adding a variety of bots in parallel steps.
9. Explore platform-based RPA for enterprise- grade automation
Different use cases call for different types of bots. The basic digitization or swivel chair operations require relatively simple types of bots that rely on the record-script-playback mechanism. Enhanced digitization requires rules management and data extraction capabilities. Knowledge worker tasks require machine learning and cognitive capabilities. You should look at platform-based RPA solutions that can provide all of these through the ability to include various types of bots – simple, complex, imaging & extraction, or cognitive.
10. Understand the prerequisites for effective RPA
Robotic process automation, in essence, is a process exercise. It is part of a solution and not the end. For instance, adding bots on top of a rigid and broken enterprise resource planning (ERP) based, process would not yield the intended benefits. Also, RPA can only be applied to the most structured and static parts of the process.
It may start with the acknowledgement of existing rigidity but could end up reinforcing it further through inflexible and granular automation, which is not desirable in the fast-moving digital environment. You need to consider how RPA fits into the overall process management. That’s where a BPM platform is a key prerequisite for RPA. Without an effective BPM platform, onboarding with RPA software is like repairing town exits where the highway is full of potholes.
Conclusion
To grow your business faster, achieve greater quality and productivity, foster happier workforce and satisfied customers, you must consider these critical factors. Keep your focus on what you want to achieve for your organization. Remember, Robotic process automation platform is valuable, but it works best when used together with a strong BPM platform to speed up your move to digital processes.
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