Embracing RPA and choosing the right processes to automate - 7 steps to success (part 5)

So you’ve built your Robotic Operating Model (ROM®) and you’re starting to deliver these processes – but how do you know if you’ve identified the right processes for automation?

If you ask your business team, they will quickly tell you their ‘pain points’ and identify these as the goals for your automation. But, actually, are these the best and most strategically relevant processes to automate as part of your wider digital transformation?

Neil Wright, Chief Customer Officer at Blue Prism, outlines why it’s vital to choose the most beneficial processes, and to deliver them in a way that embraces RPA.

At the early stages of defining your robotic process automation (RPA) strategy, you need to carry out some fundamental analysis. Which processes have you identified? And are they the best processes for your Digital Workforce to be executing?

At Blue Prism, we and our RPA partners have tools to help you carry out this analysis, and by using these tools smartly it’s possible to learn exactly what your pipeline should look like.

To complete this analysis effectively means

• Looking at your processes and quantifying what goes into your automation pipeline.
• Reviewing the return on investment (ROI) you’ll get as an organization by applying automation to each of these processes.
• Making some informed decisions about which processes you choose, and the end result that robotics and automation can deliver.

Our ‘no code RPA’ allows your Operations team to define their own processes, democratizing the whole automation process. This is a brilliant benefit of using Blue Prism, but it’s different to how automation has been handled in the past – so some form of education will be needed.

Allowing people from a business background to design and initiate their own automation processes is a step forwards. It means the whole process is repeatable, simple to set up and reduces the increase of ‘grey IT’ within your business – and that’s got to be a good thing.

But it can take a while for this outlook to become embedded in an organization and become accepted. And the language you use, and the way you talk about RPA in general, will be critical in challenging people’s mindset.

Here at Blue Prism, the terminology we use is to ‘Introduce the processes to production early in the delivery cycle’. Or, in more simple language, ‘testing in live’. The problem you have is that the phrase ‘testing in live’ will make IT managers in most companies throw their hands up in horror – and a few years ago, I’d have been one of those people.

Early in my career as an assembler/programmer, I was always told never to test in live. You built a test environment and and tested every process before anything went anywhere near the live system. And pulling that environment together can take weeks, or even months, to do.

But, in fact, the digital workers from your RPA solution are not changing anything in your system. What your robot is doing is reusing the assets that already exist in your system, and doing that in exactly the same way as your human workforce would.

So, why do you need a test environment? In reality, you don’t.

What’s needed is to truly embrace RPA. That means a reassessment of how we, as organizations, approach the introduction of the Digital Workforce into our systems.

Let’s scale back the use of the test environment, embrace the digital worker and put more time and effort into defining the most efficient processes to work on. Only by embracing RPA and automation can you achieve the true potential value of these robots.

Keep an eye on our blog over the coming weeks as we continue to breakdown the whole ROM® process into 7 key steps.

Teaming the Blue Prism ROM® method with our code-free RPA gives you a successful automation implementation – with a Digital Workforce that’s both scalable and robust.

This reduces costs, improves customer satisfaction and empowers your people to take on new responsibilities, boosting employee engagement.

Find out more by downloading our free ROM® infographic.