MAKING THE CASE FOR RPA

Starting your RPA journey

In the real scenario of the automation of digital processes, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become a very sought tool to help solve everything related to the deficiencies of its business processes. Although RPA has its advantages, its real benefits of performance and productivity come to light when they relate to specific use cases. In this blog post, I hope to illustrate how and why RPA can be useful in your digital process automation (DPA) portfolio.
Robotic Process Automation is the technology application that allows employees of a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for the system. The main value proposition of RPA is to prevent employees from carrying out trivial, highly repetitive and data-intensive tasks, which will free their employees to do more knowledge work.
RPA robots can be programmed to mimic user actions, send emails, read email attachments, access legacy applications, copy and paste data between applications, perform data validation, and perform simple tests. These characteristics provide benefits to your current business process by reducing human error and increasing efficiency.
Before continuing, you can ask: “Why is not it enough to write a macro program?” In some cases, writing a macroprogram may be your best option. However, RPA robots are macros with steroids. While macros can be performed with functions once, they can be programmed, robots can respond to external stimuli and reprogram their functions. Unlike macros, a robot can act autonomously to use and create an application, from mainframe and legacy applications to closed third-party APIs. RPA platforms also allow a low code environment in which users can develop their processes without relying on IT.
Selection criteria of RPA
In your quest to understand if RPA is suitable for your process automation journey. Here are some selection criteria to consider.
1. How mature is your process? You will get all the benefits of your RPA platform when your business processes are fully mature. Once your business processes are fully mature, they should be able to determine which tasks / processes can be completely automated, which tasks require human intervention and which tasks are necessary. You should also be able to define how exceptions are handled within a specific task / process.
2. What is your safety consideration and your RPA provider will comply with these requirements? RPA robots are considered digital workers and should have the same security considerations, if not more, than a full-time employee (FTE).
3. What are your visibility requirements for the process? Once your robots are deployed, how do you make sure that these robots work as expected? Your RPA solution should provide an immediate tool to see how well your robots are working.
4. Do you have control of your robots? Can you implement, schedule and manage your robot workforce with ease? Your RPA solution should give you this flexibility.
5. RPA provider license. While software robots are less expensive than FTEs, you should consider what type of license structure best suits your organization (ie, license capacity or robot).
RPA use cases
Lastly, but also for your consideration, is how to define use cases for RPA. The RPA use cases are included in the categories shown in the diagrams below.
Rpa use case
RPA Journey
The introduction of RPA in your organizations should be a methodical process. Starting with Concepts Test (PoC) to test technological solutions can be a great first step. However, the PoCs will never have to discard the work. You must provide the first step in the process of automating digital processes and you must also allow your organization to improve and develop existing concepts; this should happen before a full production implementation.
From here, you should identify more business processes that meet the correct selection criteria for RPA and also provide added value to the final result of your organization. The implementation of these projects to carry out a complete RPA program with a Center of Excellence (CoE). Your RPA CoE must provide an implementation framework to assist RPA projects in all of their organizations.
Creating a virtual workforce should be an initiative driven by the company. RPA can generate a large impact on the results of your organization with minimal impact on business operations. RPA provides the fastest gain in terms of production time with respect to its DPA counterparts (ie, BPM, case management, business rule engine, etc.).
While these other process automation tools have a role to play, RPA is slowly becoming the technology to follow the DPA journey. As the RPA space matures, RPA with AI will also prove to be an important game changer.

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