Unless you’ve joined a mission in Eastern Borneo – in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading this – taken a long sabbatical on the European Space Station, or just had your head buried in the sand for the last 4-5 years, you couldn’t help but notice that there has been a great deal of press coverage around Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
It sure is the talk of the town. The yes camp lists RPA as a marvel and heralds it as the fourth industrial revolution currently taking place in the back office. On the other hand, the no camp has quite blatantly labelled RPA as a job taker. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but the stats do indicate a certain wave of change flowing over the Enterprise and Shared Services Centers worldwide.
In fact, in a recent survey commissioned by Redwood Software, the findings indicate that 67% of Shared Services Centers intend to use RPA in the next 12 months, whilst a further 72% plan to leverage their current investment in ERP to drive further automation over the same period.
More are coming around to the notion that RPA really is the next best thing since sliced bread. However, many are still left wondering what the right procedure is when implementing RPA and more importantly, whose shop front they should press their noses up against to obtain the best solution for their businesses’ needs.
You see without knowing how, where and when to automate, you can miss the mark completely and not fully realise the true value inherent in RPA. And that would be totally counter-productive.
Implementing an effective and cost-effective process robotics solution should be as easy as 1-2-3.
First assess for automation opportunities by looking at which business processes are the best candidates. Second, determine the optimal operational model by assessing which one works best for your organization. Third, plan your automation road map. This final hurdle would involve determining how long the pilot should be and the stages after the pilot that involve roll out and the strategy for scaling.
Still left scratching your head? Well the good news is that if you’ve chosen the right automation partner, you shouldn’t really have to lift a finger other than when it comes to making the initial phone call. Any automation partner worth their salt should be sending in a team (such as Redwood’s Directors of Process Transformation) to handle all of these steps on your behalf and as you would expect, using best practice, determine what processes should be automated and by when. This will help you to quickly progress from the current inefficient ‘as is’ scenario, to the future and more efficient ‘to be’ scenario.
But that’s just part of the approval process when it comes to selecting an appropriate automation partner. A key component of any RPA vendor’s approach to process robotics should be to allow the organization to drive standardization by default as well as full control and governance naturally.
This is believed to be easily achievable, provided of course that the vendor’s process robotics solution can interact directly with an organization’s central system of record and the robots are able to document, track and validate entire processes and deliver a comprehensive audit trail.
Using this internal control framework, key decision makers will have the transparency to see what’s happening in real-time and react accordingly. People want to trust the information they see. And this begins and ends with trusting their RPA vendor and the solutions that they offer.
In the coming years, Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) and C-suite decision makers in major enterprises are expected to embrace robotics more aggressively and hence accelerate the use of robotics in their business and IT processes. Especially when you consider that robotics offers so many benefits such as efficiency, scalability, flexibility and improved control. Amongst others.
It certainly makes a lot of sense, but with time ticking, will common sense prevail?
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