Bringing a Greater Value From RPA Across Your Organization

If you’re planning to add a successful RPA process to your organization, this article will help you with insights about the latest RPA standards and our success stories of working with clients on RPA. Read on...

Let’s take a break and look at what revolves around the early adopter phase of RPA. If you’re a smart thinker, forward-looking for better opportunities, and running a profitable business with a dependency on effective processing, then, you’re in the game already to use RPA.

You would have already had a chance to make the best use of your human capabilities by automating repetitive cross-system tasks. You’ll have experienced deploying RPA in the areas of your business where it’s a clear win and in doing so. Now, you’ll have a processed view of the value of the technology for your organization. So where do you stand today?

• Has your deployment experience created reservations about RPA?
• Are you running ahead with a broad roll-out as part of a business-critical transformation program?
• Or you were biding one’s time to see what the payback looks like in reality?

Expanding the immense RPA requires a strong mindset and a clear approach from the experimenting phase to the transformation phase. While clearing up these discussions, organizations must make the right strategic choices for fair play in the market places.

We’ve been traveling with this, over the past five years since RPA first emerged. We’ve taken a long trip for learning the roughs and smooths of getting to grips with emerging and fast-evolving technology and applications hit the best place of delivering extreme outperformance and felt the pain of projects that take us up to the sky wheel off-course.

What’s complicated is what we’ve learned from the experience. In this article, we’ll walk you through the reasons why we strongly believe that RPA is a foundational technology, and what our project journey has taught us about best practice deployment.

Let’s see the scene by explaining the current successful use cases. And also, we’ll explain the crucial considerations in planning and delivering the next phase of roll-out. Finally, we’ll touch on the next steps we would like to suggest for your organization to fully explore RPA to keep even better and find yourself a better place in the competitive marketplace.

Let’s go!

Phase 1: Our experience of RPA in real commercial world

In our journey of various RPA consulting engagements, deployment programs, and ongoing service management. The requirement of RPA for our clients mostly falls into three categories today:

1. Utilizing RPA to manage interactions between legacy systems to create digital process flows

The widest opportunities for RPA is in connecting and shortening the processes involving older systems. RPA can easily automate them at the UI level, expanding their useful lifespan and effectiveness by closing the gaps in existing processes with automated bot activities.

For business leaders and IT heads, this is a better way to overcome issues with traditional systems and get higher value from them by running it virtually without a manual effort. It’s specifically simple to make the business case when it defers major systems investment.

Legacy systems that won’t valuably integrate with new technology tend to demand a lot of manual intervention, so there’s also an excellent way to stop the time consuming and gain efficiency in automating multi-stage human-system interactions that can be simple yet error-prone.

The ability to integrate legacy systems is the major key driver for RPA projects. By utilizing this technology, organizations can quickly cope up with their digital transformation initiatives, at the same time unlocking the value combined with previous technology investments.

Ultimately, this is a perfect use case for RPA and a better way to demonstrate how it can work to deliver valuable benefits. But it can leads to under-deliver in some instances due to the lack of bot availability. For example, small changes to front-end user interfaces (UI) are easily understandable by a human operator. But RPA bots require precise clear instruction to carry out all actions in a consistent environment. Even a small piece of Change in UI or a security update can confuse an RPA operation.

But, with good RPA management practices, we can overcome this, IT teams can maintain systems little frequently and update the RPA to ensure continuous, effective operation. But it does require constant attention but as a matter of fact, an RPA bot cannot adapt by itself to seemingly trivial changes in a similar way that a human can. We have seen some RPA deployments abandoned because expectations were over-set and it was considered as a one-time fix.

2. Creating robotic interactions between modern applications

The next frequent application of RPA is in connecting modern applications, where it can feasibly automate at the API level. Logically, this is a more resilient approach. According to the nature of API architecture, bots that interact at this level can accommodate some small variations at the UI level without management interference.

Organizations that are utilizing RPA in this way can easily drive more strategic value from it, even though the immediate pain relief, payback, or freeing up of operational resources may not be as expected impactful. Rather than developing a workaround, IT teams are building RPA into their operational and development plans as inbuilt technology, to improve the productivity and efficiency of processes that help to work effectively but sub-optimally, rather than dramatically fixing something that’s broken.

Utilizing RPA to optimize modern applications is a more valuable approach to existing systems that have a reasonably better life. It’s a way to voice out the power of RPA as business as usual, looking for opportunities to apply it to current infrastructure throughout the business.

3. Automated Bots designing and redesigning processes

This is the most excited and strategic approach to RPA, used by industry and sector leaders who have a clear-cut and realistic understanding of what RPA can deliver.

These organizations are developing robotic automation into all future infrastructure, process planning, and system development. They are syncing the potential to augment RPA with artificial intelligence (AI) to be more self-moving, creating machine learning that can continually review and enhance processes.

Survey says 2023, 40% of I&O teams will use AI-augmented automation in large scale enterprises, resulting in unexpected huge IT productivity with greater agility and scalability.”

In our point of view, this is where all growing organizations need to be in the medium term. But to deploy RPA strategically in this way requires experience, strong confidence, sector and operational absorbing as well as strong technical expertise in robotic automation.

The recent headline benefit of RPA may be to patch up creating systems to make short term efficiency gains, but this can’t continue for a long time. For any organization that has more than a tactical IT support department, the future IT and digital vision and strategy may need to add RPA intrinsically. At a minimum, organizations must use RPA efficiencies integral to their current systems development plan, as a priority for investment in new technology.

Phase 2: Current RPA delivery

We’re not brave enough to take a new world of experimentation chance and pioneering RPA spirit anymore. One loud voice on the management or IT team can’t drive your progress alone. You need to gather what resources and expertise you need to deliver a significant and expanding RPA atmosphere that’s business-critical.

Our most powerful clients are looking at a range of options in the context of their core business, new technology maturity, and in-house capabilities. Very few fewer people have the internal staff-base to accomplish and support an organization-wide RPA program today. It’s a strategic decision whether to develop your in-house expertise, in the field of RPA improving constantly, or to seek loyalty support outside the business.

1. Targeted strategy partnerships

Using a third-party RPA expert to plan and implement your RPA roll-out and inform your strategy is a perfect option. The technology and combined concepts and applications are evolving at jet speed.

In selecting a partner, make a decision clearly, but don’t take a long gap. With gearing uptake of RPA, the better performing teams and experts are in demand. Keen as they are to capitalize on this wide market, their standard is finite. RPA companies are some of the quick-growing in the digital industry, but there’s a restriction to the rate at which they can train and recruit high-quality people.

The rapid absorption of RPA software has developed a lot of demand in the market, leading many organizations to jump into RPA initiatives without a proper takeover, planning, defined strategies and CoEs.

All this puts you at risk of getting bugs by failing to automate the correct processes, identify the right materials, and focus on security issues and access rights.

Take a quick look at the track record and experience of short-listed partners. Find out how they’ve educated themselves in updating information on RPA technology developments, through training and thought leadership.

Make sure that you can collaborate with them to deliver what you need and that their approach is clear with your business culture. Figure out what they know about RPA elaborately of your business sector or similar industries. Note that we’re talking about a strategic partnership rather than tactical support. A sharp business-wide approach to RPA means you’ll need a strong grip working relationship with an expert who can get close to your business goals, objectives, operations and processes and grasp how they can help and be a part of your success.

If they can identify your priorities and know what RPA is capable of in your working, you can work with your chosen expert to apply RPA shortly where it delivers the most effective results both tactically and strategically. With both, you can build a long-term plan to support business imperatives and measure ROI.

2. Managed services

To get a better advantage from your deployed and exploring RPA estate, you need RPA automatic bot maintenance programs and constant system and process reviews for automation. That means it’s likely that you’ll be utilizing RPA for a mix of legacy systems methods connectivity and new capability development.

RPA bots need checks and recurring checking processes to accommodate process evolution – you need to cope up with this as well as concentrating on future development. A managed services approach means you can focus on expanding strategic value and leave a loyal partner to ensure your systems and RPA bots are working continuously to work in harmony.

If you have an in-house team to prepare up, it may be better to take a look to the future in terms and gaining the knowledge and capability they’ll need to develop and handle the RPA environment, rather than just training them to support your traditional tactical RPA projects for legacy systems. Leave that to your managed services partner, as the service life of these projects is limited: it might not worth it to be a long-term training and development pays in short-term management and niche technical skills in-house.

3. Centre of Excellence (COE)

The RPA sector is evolving like a jet, so testing and best practice are happening all the time. If you’re looking to own and deliver RPA in-house, you need to give some development time to this and activate your own COE culture internally. This could provide you a competitive advantage from exclusive developments that will keep you unique in your competitive market, in speed and quality of service delivery.

But it’s likely to be a little luxurious option, with RPA growing very fast and industry cross-pollination revealing modern and more productive applications. Unless you’re related to the technology business and can acquire the benefit for your clients, you may not have the appetite or the funds to support that level of R&D.

If you’re one of the partners with an RPA expert that has a COE or lab environment and an iterative learning approach, they can provide their new methods of innovation to you. As RPA and AI converge, there will be a huge number of scenarios to test, to demonstrate the security, reliability, and feasibility of complicated machine decision technology. Few mainstream commercial organizations have the immense pockets and core business synergies to do this in-house, let alone the will.

If your COE partner has concentrated on your industry sector, it could be to your knowledge to learn from their work with other clients. This method decreases the financial risk to your business. To handle a practical level of in-house knowledge, a third-party COE may provide focused training and updates for your team.

4. Bot as a Service

Emerging as a supply option is a concept of providing automatic bot hours as a service. Software, storage, and server capability that can all be procured in this way, avoiding wastage and maximizing value.

BaaS (Bot as a Service) is most likely to become a popular acronym. Your organization could lease some or all of its bots, updating and replacing them as needed to tackle with fast-evolving technology.

This service model is only new to the market but scoped up like everything in the RPA world, it’s likely to collect momentum rapidly. You should be ready to decide where, when, and how you might capitalize and how it works for ROI for your RPA investment.

So, what’re your next steps for your organization?

As a successful, performance-focused business, I am pretty sure you know that RPA is a critical technology for future success.

If you’re not clear with advanced planning for roll-out, it’s time to add a step for automation high on your executive priority agenda. Here are the steps to take now:

• Put RPA and AI on the executive agenda for action, as the biggest topic for the future
• Utilize RPA as an organization-broad approach and develop a transformation program to implant it. Get every functional head to analyze how RPA could enhance their latest and future activities and work with them to create a better business case.
• Make sure that operational planning always adds RPA, recognizing the opportunity to take a keen look at resources and enhance your business performance and make it unique.
• Develop your in-house resources and external partners.
  • Check whether you have the skills, enough training?
  • Clear with the plan and budget you need?
  • Have you identified the correct people and technologies to work with?
  • Do you have a loyal expert partner who can advise on strategy, applications and priorities for your sector and business?

Analyze all these well before you decide to innovate and embed RPA into your organization.

About Skcript

We are one of a leading automation consultancy company with an established Robotic Process Automation (RPA) practice with certified RPA experts. From our heritage in HR and Sales Operations, we’ve developed a big broad range of services across all business areas, with a flexible and agile delivery model. Read our success stories.

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