What is RPA? The business process automation revolution

​More and more chief information security officers are turning to robotic process automation to eliminate tedious tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. But experts say RPA needs proper design, planning and governance if it is to support the business.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology application controlled by business logic and structured inputs designed to automate business processes. Using RPA tools, companies can configure software or "bots" to capture and interpret applications used to process transactions, manipulate data, trigger responses and communicate with other digital systems. RPA scenarios range from generating automated responses to emails to deploying thousands of bots, each programmed to automate work in an ERP system.

Many chief information officers are turning to RPA to streamline business operations and reduce costs. Enterprises can automate common rules-based business processes, allowing business users to spend more time serving customers or other higher-value work. Others see RPA as a stopgap solution to intelligent automation (IA) through machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can be trained to make judgments about future output.

What are the benefits of RPA?

RPA provides organizations with the ability to reduce personnel costs and human errors. Intelligent automation expert Kofax said the principle is simple: let human workers do the work humans do best while using robots to handle tasks that get in the way.

Robots are typically low-cost and easy to implement, requiring no custom software or deep system integration. These characteristics are critical as organizations pursue growth without adding significant expense or friction among employees.

Kofax says that if configured properly, software robots can increase a team's ability to work by 35% to 50%. For example, simple, repetitive tasks such as copying and pasting information between business systems can be accelerated by 30% to 50% when completed using bots. Automating such tasks can also improve accuracy by eliminating the opportunity for human error, such as transposing numbers during data entry.

Enterprises can also enhance their automation efforts by injecting cognitive technologies such as ML, speech recognition, and natural language processing into RPA to automate high-level tasks that in the past required human perception and judgment capabilities.

This type of RPA implementation can automate 15 to 20 steps and is part of a value chain called Intelligent Automation (IA).

What is an excellent RPA tool?

The RPA market consists of new, purpose-built tools and legacy tools that have added new capabilities to support automation. Some started out as business process management (BPM) tools. Some vendors position their tools as "workflow automation" or "workflow management." Overall, the RPA software market is expected to grow from $2.4 billion in 2021 to $6.5 billion in 2025, according to Forrester research.

Some excellent RPA tool vendors include:

• Appian
• AutomationAnywhere
• AutomationEdge
• BluePrism
• CycloneRobotics
• Datamatics
• EdgeVerveSystems
• HelpSystems
• IBM
• Kofax
• Kryon
• Laiye
• Microsoft
• NICE
• Nintex
• NTT-AT
• Pegasystems
• SamsungSDS
• Servicetrace
• WorkFusion

What are the criteria for selecting RPA tools?

10 key factors to consider when choosing an RPA tool:

• Ease of setting up the bot
• Low-code capabilities
• Attended vs. unattended
• Machine learning capabilities
• Exception handling and manual review
• Integration with enterprise applications
• Orchestration and management
• Cloud robot
• Process and Task Discovery and Mining
• Scalability

What are the top RPA certifications?

As organizations increasingly adopt RPA, they also need people with expertise in RPA tools and implementation. Many of the most popular RPA certifications are offered by vendors, including:

• Appian
• Automation Anywhere
• BluePrism
• UiPath
• Microsoft

10 Tips for Effective Robotic Process Automation

Given the potential complexity of legacy business processes and the level of change management required for RPA to be successful, implementing RPA may have challenge. The following tips can help your organization get off to a smooth start:

(1) Set and manage expectations

RPA can win quickly, but driving RPA to operate at scale is another story. Many RPA hiccups stem from poor expectation management. Bold claims about RPA from vendors and implementation consultants don't help. That's why CIOs must enter the company with cautious optimism.

(2) Consider the business impact

RPA is often touted as a mechanism to increase return on investment or reduce costs. But it can also be used to improve customer experience. For example, businesses like airlines employ thousands of customer service agents, but customers are still waiting in line to answer the phone. Chatbots can help alleviate some of the waiting.

(3) Involve IT early and often

COOs were some of the first adopters of RPA. In many cases, they purchase RPA and hit a brick wall during implementation, prompting them to seek help (and forgiveness) from IT. Now, “citizen developers” with no technical expertise are using cloud software to implement RPA in their business units. Often, CIOs tend to step in and stop them. Business leaders must involve IT from the beginning to ensure they have the resources they need.

(4) Poor design, change management can wreak havoc

Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer at Genpact, said many implementations fail because of poor design and change management. In the rush to deploy something, some companies overlook the exchange of communications between various bots, which can disrupt business processes. "You have to think about operating model design before implementation," Srivastava said. "You need to map out how you expect the various robots to work together."

Alternatively, some CIOs neglect to negotiate the changes that new business will have on the organization's business processes. CIOs must plan ahead to avoid business disruption.

(5) Don’t fall into the data trap

A bank that deploys thousands of robots to automate manual data entry or monitor software operations generates massive amounts of data. This can tempt CIOs and their business peers into unfortunate scenarios where they hope to leverage data. Srivastava said it's not uncommon for companies to run machine learning on the data generated by their bots and put a chatbot in front to make it easier for users to query the data.

Suddenly, the RPA project becomes a machine learning project, and the project was not properly defined as a machine learning project. CIOs work hard to catch up, Srivastava said. He advises CIOs to view RPA as a long-term arc rather than as piecemeal projects that evolve into unmanageable pieces.

(6) Project governance is critical

Another problem that arises in RPA is the failure to plan for certain obstacles, Srivastava said. An employee of a Genpact customer changed the company's password policy, but no one programmed the bot to make the adjustment, resulting in data loss. CIOs must constantly check for choke points where their RPA solutions may be bogging down, or at least install a monitoring and alerting system to watch for small issues that impact performance.

(7) Controlling Maintaining Compliance

There are many governance challenges associated with instantiating a single bot, let alone thousands. A Deloitte client held several meetings to try to determine whether its robot would be male or female, a valid gender issue but one that must take into account human resources, ethics and other areas of business compliance.

(8) Establish an RPA Center of Excellence

The most successful RPA implementations include a center of excellence comprised of people responsible for making efficiency initiatives successful within the organization. However, not every business has the budget for this. The RPA Center of Excellence develops business cases, calculates potential cost optimization and ROI, and measures progress against these goals.

(9) Don’t forget the impact on people

In the attraction of shiny new solutions, some organizations are so focused on implementation that they neglect the human resources cycle, which may This can create some nightmares for employees who find their daily routines and workflows disrupted.

(10) Incorporate RPA into your entire development lifecycle

CIOs must automate the entire development lifecycle or they risk killing their bots during a big release.

Ultimately, there is no magic bullet for implementing RPA, but Srivastava said it requires an ethos of intelligent automation that must be part of an enterprise's long-term journey. Srivastava said: "Automation needs to find the answers, all the ifs, thens and whats to complete business processes faster, with better quality and at greater scale."​

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