Robotic process automation (RPA) implementation is about more than just finding a software tool. RPA can transform your business by simplifying the tedious, repetitive processes holding you back, but to do so, you need a proper RPA implementation strategy.
Companies want to embrace the transformative technology but struggle with where to start, what processes to automate, and how to measure the baselines, which can result in their projects being dead on arrival—an estimated 60 to 70 percent of initial RPA projects fail to meet expectations according to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation & Artificial Intelligence.
We’ve outlined the six steps of implementing robotic process automation, packed with best practices and real-world examples to support your RPA journey with the right amount of knowledge and strategy. With this helpful framework to get you focused on the right objectives, you’ll be well on your way to a successful and sustainable digital transformation.
RPA Implementation: How to Get Started
As you get started with an RPA implementation, it’s important to develop your RPA roadmap. This is a high-level plan that defines an overarching objective and outlines the steps, milestones, and intermittent deadlines a team will follow when deploying RPA within their organization. The below steps will make the backbone of your roadmap, but remember it is not a static plan. Your RPA implementation roadmap must continue to evolve and develop as your organization moves through planning, piloting, deployment, scaling, and maintenance.
Who’s Involved in RPA Implementation
When adding a digital workforce to your organization through an RPA implementation, it’s always important to keep your human workforce front and center. Creating a cross-functional team is the key to a successful implementation as you coordinate efforts through various departments—including business, IT, and operations—to ensure the smoothest RPA deployment.
1. Business Analysts
Business analysts document the processes to be automated and assess the impact RPA will have in each functional department of your organization.
2. IT Team
The IT team is tasked with building out your automation in the most efficient way possible that can scale and be re-used by business users.
3. Operations Team
The operations team tests and monitors automation from a production standpoint to ensure everything is working smoothly and optimally.
Develop a Center of Excellence Framework
Set yourself up for future growth by developing an RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) framework that helps identify automation priorities and opportunities and prevents you from reinventing the wheel every time you bring automation to a new part of the company.
Potential RPA Implementation Challenges
Automation, like any major business change, presents unique challenges and objections from those inside your organization. A solid RPA implementation plan can help you avoid many common RPA pitfalls. This plan should also include information to help build support for RPA initiatives and help business leaders learn how best to prepare for and leverage RPA, while assuaging common objectives:
Objection #1: Stakeholders think current processes are working fine and don’t see a need for automation.
RPA is intended to improve processes, so while there may be a process in place now, it can undoubtedly be more efficient and less error-prone with automation. Mission critical tasks can continue to be run when employees take time off—or even leave the company. Reducing the number of human touchpoints of a process not only saves time but also allows employees to focus on more strategic tasks.
For example, any process that involves data entry is compelling as there are so many opportunities for error. When manual data entry is out of the picture, not only are employees less held back by tedious work, but processes run smoother and with greater accuracy, saving the company not just time, but money from reducing costly errors.
Objection #2: Employees are worried that the bots are coming to take their jobs.
RPA bots are intended to work alongside human employees as part of a digital workforce. Talk about RPA in your department as a helping hand to take the time-consuming, repetitive tasks and empower you to do your job better. All while freeing up your workload so you can focus on more strategic, creative or meaningful tasks.
Objection #3: Leadership feels the cost of an RPA solution is too high.
Just let the numbers do the talking. Desktop automation is a great place to start to see quick wins and ROI by improving personal productivity for individual users. RPA can act as a digital coworker, completing the manual, mundane tasks holding back your human workforce—all at a fraction of the price of hiring a full-time employee to help.
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1. Learn What RPA Implementation Is and What It Is Not
Start by understanding what RPA can and cannot do. RPA technology helps your organization run more efficiently by taking repetitive manual tasks and handing them over to software robots. However, these bots do not self-learn, think, or act on their own—humans are still the “brains” of the operation. But by working together with a digital workforce, employees can focus more of their time on more complex, value-added work functions.
2. Identify Potential RPA Implementation Opportunities
Hearing about the benefits of RPA will make you want to automate everything. But to be successful, you need to start small. As you get started, the best processes to automate are repetitive, routine, and otherwise mundane tasks—like data entry and extraction.
3. Select Initial Use Cases for Implementing RPA and Define Success Criteria
Once you’ve created your wish list, it’s time to narrow down your choice for an initial use case. Rank your wish list by considering the time saved, frequency, criticality, and effort it would take to automate, and choose the process that checks the most boxes. Then you can define what will deem your pilot a success by seeing how working with RPA bots improves each of those areas.
4. Pilot RPA Solution for Initial Use Case
There are lots of RPA solutions out there, but they’re not all created equal. This is a great time to trial an RPA solution. A trial not only lets you test out RPA, but also helps you find the right RPA vendor for your unique organizational needs and get comfortable with the software. Look for vendors who can offer end-to-end process support while also having the capabilities to become fully operational quickly.
Fortra’s Automate is uniquely positioned within the RPA landscape—helping you achieve your automation goals now and setting you up for where you want to go in the future. Built and priced right for employee driven, enterprise-wide automation—whether for personal productivity or business process automation across people and departments. As a well-rounded, complete automation solution, Automate RPA has the flexibility to streamline mission-critical IT and business processes across your organization, to maximize efficiencies and boost productivity.
Execute a Proof of Concept
Once you’ve identified a potential RPA solution, the next step is to observe the solution working within your business environment. A POC will help to validate that the automation solution will meet the goals of your organization, so you can feel confident moving forward with wider implementation.
5. Measure Results and Document Lessons Learned
from RPA Implementation
With the clearly defined success criteria from Step 3, it should be easy to measure the results of your pilot use case. Take a look back at how things went and document what went well, what could’ve been better, and any other lessons learned. To calculate your automation ROI, compare the costs of implementation, deployment, and maintenance against how much time is saved, if accuracy is improved, and how little human intervention is needed. This will help you determine if you want to move forward with an RPA solution.
6. Expand to Next Use Case and Repeat Pilot, Measure,
& Expand Steps
If you liked what RPA software had to offer and were happy with the results of your pilot use case, it’s time to expand. Move down your automation wish list from Step 2 and create a plan to try RPA in other areas of your organization. Act as an RPA evangelist to help get more people on board with this powerful technology. The steps of the RPA journey don’t have to end as there’s always processes that can be streamlined through RPA.
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