Top 8 Principles of Robotic Process Automation
In our previous article, we introduced RPA and addressed how it can leverage our businesses. The definition of RPA was presented as, “A technology that automates business processes by mimicking and emulating human interactions using software robots equipped with recent technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, etc.”
In this article, we describe the top 8 principles of RPA that should be considered by business analysts, solution architects, developers, and all the stakeholders participating in the RPA steps. Although these principles can be diversified regarding the business context and firm culture, we try to address the most generic ones which are almost valid for most RPA projects.
Enjoy your reading…
Rule 1: Scan Business Processes
Before starting a good RPA digital transformation journey, most critical rule is to scan all the business processes of an organization. Business analysts or the staff responsible for leading the RPA project should scan business processes using interviews, surveys, observations and even discussions. And, it is required to understand the complexity, automation benefits, responsibilities of staff for each process. After conducting these steps, processes should be detailed on a document in a structured way.
Rule 2: Consider 80:20 Rule and Start from Easiest Process
The rule of thumb mainly is that ‘ 20 gets you 80 ‘. In other terms, 20 percent of your customers produce 80 percent of your profits, the first 20 percent of your effort generally gets you 80 percent of the way to your target, etc. However, this rule is a bit different in the automation domain. Since this 20 percent workload is quite complex to resolve. And, addressing the automation of this workload will be costly in terms of money, time, effort and several resources. Also, the complexity of these processes would cause delays in RPA projects which lead to a rejection of RPA among process owners and decision-makers. Therefore, addressing the 80 percent workload at the first phase will be easier while considering automation processes. Start from the easiest process to automate. Although automating 80 percent will provide a 20 percent benefit, the RPA project owner will able to show the ease of use and usability of RPA to service owners and decision-makers. These outputs are very critical to adopt the RPA project.
Rule 3: Understand and Reengineer Processes
In most cases, the steps of a process aren’t clear. Although the steps have been documented before, they may be outdated or not transcribed in detail. In these situations, the business analyst may need to go deeper and extract hidden steps of a process. Or, he/she even go back to previous steps considering the actual outputs of a process. Note that the role of a business analyst is not to improve the process, it should be understanding all the elements of a process using reengineering methods. Then validate these elements and steps regarding the views of stakeholders.
Rule 4: Divide Processes into Smaller Parts
It is essential to divide processes into smaller parts while ensuring the completeness and continuity of a process. Although there are several opinions on the field, the number of tasks of a process shouldn’t be more than 25–30 steps as a best practice of automating a process. By combining several automation tasks, complex automation processes can be achieved.
Rule 5: Show Proof-of-Concept to Customers
Most of the process owners and decision-makers would need to see some piece of automation examples to be convinced. The role of a business analyst and other RPA staff is to implement a simple but fruitful RPA example as being a pilot study. Then assist this pilot RPA by demonstrating videos, prior examples, presentations, etc. The Trialability opportunity of pilot RPA cases would facilitate the adoption of RPA among all stakeholders.
Rule 6: Construct Center of Excellence within Organization
The Center of Excellence (CoE) is a digital-transformation team that leads and assists the RPA project within the organization. It is responsible for closing the gap between the RPA team and the organization. So, the member of CoE should be from various departments of the organization. Building an automation culture and sharing practices, CoE should participate in preparing, building, implementing, testing and stabilizing phases of the RPA project. After the project end, the organization will have a strong RPA CoE with adequate skills.
Rule 7: Follow the Customer-Centric Approach
Listen to your customers during each stage of RPA. Steps such as scanning of processes, prioritizing and selecting the best suitable ones, solving problems can be only conducted based on the customers’ feedbacks. Please remember that each organization is unique and there is no single truth or best possible choice! Organizational culture, C-level priorities, technical and business background of the firm should be taken into account in RPA projects.
Rule 8: Listen to other RPA Team Members
Whether you are a business analyst, solution architect or developer, you need to listen to other team members. As a business analyst or a solution architect being coordinated and getting feedback from other RPA developers would broaden your knowledge about the capabilities and limitations of RPA implementation. On the other hand, as an RPA developer, you need to listen to analysts and architects to implement wright thing to address business needs and priorities
In this article, we list some key principles of RPA. We hope it would be a quick guide for RPA team members in their projects. In the next article, we will address the dark side of the RPA and its limitations.
Good luck in your RPA journey :)
References
https://www.analysysmason.com/
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