Don’t drown in the RPA Sea of Opportunity.
Ensure your organisation’s preparations for RPA process discovery are watertight and ready for anything. Here are Skore’s recommendations for RPA process discovery success.
A previous blog explored the difficulties, especially in organisations new to RPA, in identifying good opportunities for implementing robots.
However, this blog focuses more on when you have some fantastic early success with RPA. Interestingly this leads to a number of different problems to consider:
- how to quickly evaluate and prioritise the requests
- how to collaborate with the requesting teams
- how to maintain the growing number of robots.
It was the perfect example to demonstrate that getting RPA process discovery right means this situation will happen sooner than you think. We recommend that you start thinking about the following early on in your RPA journey.
Evaluate and prioritise requests
You will move from a hunting model to a servicing model. Instead of searching out for opportunities and candidates for RPA, you will be receiving requests from colleagues across the business.
Remember that very few people will have the experience you have in identifying these opportunities. Requests will vary from a near perfect fit to wildly unsuitable and will differ considerably in size and complexity. You won’t have time to do a thorough investigation into each one before deciding whether to engage or not. You need to make sure your team are as prepared as possible to evaluate these opportunities effectively.
With a Process Improvement Platform, such as Skore, you can quickly capture a high level view of the process. Plus you can determine suitability, feasibility and the potential business case.
This can be done in a single conversation with the requesting team, or, you can even ask them to do it themselves.
The information is saved directly to the system and a pipeline of candidates is produced and ranked according to the potential benefits. Process discovery and evaluation is arguably the most important stage of the RPA model, do not underestimate it.
Collaboration with the business
From the time a request is submitted, until the robot is delivered, communication with the requesting team is essential. If you’re accepting requests and managing comms via email this is never going to scale.
Consider a task management tool such as Asana, Jira or Monday. These can be configured to accept requests electronically, manage projects and provide dashboards so that both the delivery team and the requesting team can see the status of the project at any time.
With the processes captured in Skore it’s very easy to indicate which steps are to be automated and tested. This can be exported to your task management tool to provide the framework to the project, if accepted.
Robot maintenance
Ongoing maintenance of robots is something that very few teams consider… until they need it. Very few robots can be built and forgotten. Robots are using systems and forms that can change. Robots themselves are software and will receive updates and improvements that need to be considered. Data used by the robots can change too.
Ensure that you maintain a catalogue of previously built robots and their current operating status. Use monitoring to notify you of potential issues that arise before they have a significant impact on the process. Plan maintenance windows to allow you to update robots as and when required.
Ultimately, robots are like any other system the organisation manages so it’s essential that you have clear processes to deal with outages, issues and general maintenance. Don’t undervalue this step in your RPA implementation plan.
Conclusion
Get RPA right and it has the impact to transform a business and it can happen quickly. When it does you need to be ready to take full advantage. Think early about how you’re going to scale production and maintenance and what tools you will use to plan, evaluate and review. This will save you a lot of trouble and lost opportunity when your RPA vision truly sets sail.
Skore is cloud based software platform designed so that everyone in your organisation can understand and collaborate on your processes. If you’d like to learn more about how Skore could help your automation endeavours then get in touch.