Robotic Process Automation - RPA Success Factors

Robotic process automation streamlines workflows thereby making organizations more responsive, profitable and flexible. Switching from simple, back-office tasks to scaled automation can be a time-consuming process. However, once implemented the success factors for RPA enable you to achieve digital transformation with no lag time.

RPA allows your team to spend more time on strategic work rather than performing a ton of repetitive tasks. You don’t have to spend your valuable time on mundane tasks like filling out forms in spreadsheets, approving access requests, generating reports, forwarding emails and creating IT tickets. Though these processes are crucial, RPA can help you accomplish more in less time.

Key Success Factors for Robotic Process Automation

As robotic process automation continues to soar through the hype-cycle curve, there is every possibility to forget that technology isn't a magic rod that creates things as you wave them. IT and business leaders in urgency might try to speed up RPA projects. However, there are essential rpa critical success factors for the automation process. Let’s explore these important rpa success factors to increase your project's outcome.

Identify the problem

Let's face reality; you can't solve a project when you don't know the problem. It's like somebody who is not feeling fine but doesn't know what the problem is. Here, you would need a professional doctor to diagnose the problem. It applies to robotic process automation. As you start your reviewing process of an RPA application, you must know which processes to automate.

In proffering a solution, you need to know what to expect from the automation process. In addition, will it offer increased productivity and greater efficiency? Will the automation benefit direct cost savings? If the answer is a resounding yes, you are considering your return on investment.

Conducting a feasibility analysis

One of the most rpa critical success factors for implementing robotic process automation is conducting a feasibility analysis. RPA is a new technology, and as with any new platform or technology in its early stage of adoption and maturity requires mapping to the business need.

Therefore, the project should be subject to a feasibility analysis to guarantee success. This can be from a business and technical perspective. Peradventure, your company, didn't engage with IT early and continued the process; it might result in seeing your project being forced to fit into a program. On the other end, you won't actualize the expected benefits of implementing robotic process automation for your business.

The feasibility analysis stage is where the best details of the process get emphasized. However, it doesn’t mean that the robotic process automation processes are inflexible. Importantly, organizations can implement bots to handle changes within the templates, report duration, data volume, and much more.

Prepare for success

Most organizations forget the aspect of preparing for successful robotic process automation. It's one of the critical rpa success factors to contemplate when creating an automation process. RPA is fast-growing, and businesses are apprehensive about bringing in artificial intelligence-based projects.

Nevertheless, a lack of understanding of why your organization requires RPA can result in a massive failure. It's like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant. Regrettably, a failed RPA project can alter how an organization sees technology. Therefore, one of the significant rpa critical success factors is to avoid rushing an RPA project.

You need to extensively plan for robotic process automation to avoid the tale of the ant happening to your business. To achieve success with robotic process automation, persistence is critical.

Adhere to the SITO (Simplify, Improve, Transform and Optimize) rule

While there are several rpa success factors, adhering to the SITO steps is critical. Implementing an RPA initiative can be the best opportunity to take a step backward and consider the process using the SITO steps. If you can simplify a process, there will be less difficulty to sustain later.

Furthermore, if improvement is possible on the existing project, it is for all benefit. However, you can transform the project to add digital elements to enhance the customer experience. The final step is optimizing the processes since an optimized process can generate more outcomes. Before feeding the project into the robotic process automation engine, you need to do these things.

Process Maturity

Although robotic process automation is a viable solution for most people, you need to understand that some processes are unsuitable for RPA. It generates the best return on investment when executed on processes that are rule-based, repetitive, labor-intensive, and use structured data.

Robotic process automation is appropriate for defined, repetitive, matured, and data-heavy processes. Therefore, to evaluate if a process is a potential candidate for robotic process automation, it must have an RPA readiness and process maturity assessment before its execution.

In addition, before conducting the RPA readiness and process maturity assessment, organizations must ensure their business case and target return on investments have been set. This will help generate only a high return on investment because it has undergone several processes.

Communicating with participants

Communicating with stakeholders is another rpa key success factor affecting your robotic process automation. The best way to utilize RPA is when all participants are in sync and updated about the process. The IT team is the first people to get contacted once the bot goes live in most situations. Therefore, it's critical to keep everyone involved in the project informed and updated to avoid any roadblocks.

Conclusion

Going through the several rpa success factors, organizations need to understand the impact of robotic process automation. RPA will continuously increase as companies seek an alternative method to employ greater accuracy and efficiency in different processes. Overall, robotic process automation allows companies and organizations to employ automation for repetitive activities that help minimize cost and time.