The word “Process” within Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is very vital and great care must be taken and we must choose our process wisely. The correct selection of these determines the success or failure of the successful implementation of RPA. The observation is that RPA projects do not meet return on investment (ROI) expectations only due to wrong choice in process selection.
With so much hype around RPA, customers or business leaders with limited knowledge of RPA often end up selecting the wrong one as part of their debut RPA implementation. The wrong choice of process does not provide them with the expected return on investment and leaves them dejected. Looking at their lower ROI, even other business leaders tend to lose confidence in implementing RPA.
Choose the process wisely, what does that mean? First, let’s understand your key purpose or objective as you implement RPA and what it is that you, as a business leader, want to achieve.
(a) Are you trying to introduce RPA just to reduce the number of employees?
(b) Do you hope to simplify or automate the process to increase productivity?
(c) Are you wanting to automate just the complex process?
Before we can address these questions, let’s be clear about what contributes to the wrong selection of the RPA process.
(a) If your process logic or business rules keep changing often with increasing regularity, then your process is not suitable to be a good candidate for RPA process selection. New business rules mean reconfiguration every time business rules or logic change.
(b) If your process is dependent on frequently changing government or regulatory changes, then that process will also not produce the optimal ROI when it comes to RPA implementation.
(c) If your process has a low volume of data or if your selected process is one that runs only once in a given year (for example, Annual Employee Assessment), that process does not give the best ROI results or is equivalent to saving man hours.
Before getting to the heart of understanding the process, it would be ideal if we first did an Initial Process Assessment and determine which process best fits with the tips above in mind.
Bottom line: Choose your process wisely for robotic process automation – processes that are rule-based, stable, data-intensive, and business rules don’t change frequently.