Robotic process automation (RPA) continues to play a significant part as businesses seek more effective ways of driving impact and boosting productivity. In addition to helping businesses automate repetitive tasks, RPA provides better control of operations, no wonder its market size is expected to exceed five billion dollars by 2024.
The advantages of RPA notwithstanding, research shows that 30-50 percent of initial RPA projects fail due to poor implementation. However, by learning the nuances of its adoption, you will be able to bypass some of the challenges, and accordingly, enjoy its benefits to the maximum.
Read on to learn how you can successfully implement RPA in your business.
1. Start small and learn
Implementation of RPA is contingent on various factors, including the type of business and the processes you are automating. Take time to learn about the tools and technology to tackle the process successfully. Having the requisite knowledge can also help as you prepare to introduce the technology to the rest of the team.
Starting small and automating simple is an effective way to develop a viable strategy and to avoid common challenges that invariably make deploying RPA a challenge. While here, remember to assess how it supports your business and its ultimate value to your organization.
2. Define your RPA objectives
Identifying your long-term and short-term objectives for implementing RPA is critical for your digital transformation. Long term objectives may include an increase in productivity, reduction in costs, and employee substitution, while short term objectives may include completing tasks with ease, sourcing a list of information, and saving time.
Keep in mind that your RPA objectives must align with your overall organizational goals for easier implementation. Once you identify key areas under the objectives, you can rest assured that you are on the right path to automating processes in your company.
3. Consider your workforce
Implementing RPA in the workplace involves shifting from the traditional ways of operating a business to a customer-focused and value-adding working environment. For successful adoption, you need to acclimate your employees by preparing and educating them on the new operational means. This way, you make the implementation process seamless from beginning to end.
Undoubtedly, your workforce is central to your business, and you ought to make it a priority when introducing RPA. In any case, your workforce management and rostering will have to change, and these changes cannot happen without the involvement of your workforce.
4. Scale your RPA efforts
After testing your automation efforts through small scale testing, you can go ahead to introduce the technology on a large scale. You should begin by identifying the processes that should be automated, and the best way to do this is to seek advice from consulting services who can advise you on critical aspects such as scalability, compliance, and optimization.
Scaling your automation efforts requires you to find the processes that provide the least value for your business. This will help you deploy RPA without disrupting your workflows, making the automation process less stressful.
5. Implement governance and compliance
Having guidelines on governance and compliance is important in preventing unethical usage and biases as you introduce RPA for your business. Moreover, it ensures that you are automating the right processes in line with your ultimate goals. Remember that unethical application thereof can cause significant harm in the long run, so you need to have a set of rules and regulations for the sake of business stability and continuity.
Provide sufficient training to your workforce so that it is able to operate in accordance with the rules. Your IT team, executives, and managers come in handy in ensuring compliance at different stages of RPA deployment.
6. Build a virtual workforce
Building a virtual workforce entails training software bots to work like humans. You can start by introducing simple tasks to test their efficiency as well as to gauge where you need to make adjustments. Along the way and throughout the lifecycle of your bots, carry out maintenance to maximize their efficiency.
It is also important to make your virtual workforce accountable just like the rest of the workforce. This goes a long way in ensuring that everything is working with no hiccups and that you are getting value for your money.
7. Implement holistically
Introducing artificial intelligence (AI) in your business not only helps you automate mundane tasks but also encourages innovation in how you operate and serve customers. For this reason, you should approach RPA holistically so that you are able to exploit analytics and machine learning effectively.
As mentioned before, RPA is what you need to streamline most processes for your business. With technology, your employees can focus on the more important tasks and delegate simpler jobs to bots. Accordingly, you are sure to improve performance, which translates to a higher return on investment.
8. Measure and improve
You cannot gauge the efficiency of your RPA without measuring and assessing how it is working. To do this, you need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to see whether it is providing the expected results. Be sure to regularly record its success and failures along the way to help you understand what you need change or adjust.
Furthermore, measuring and improving the performance of your RPA makes sure that you are in line with the goals and objectives of the company. Like any other technology, you are sure to find discrepancies as you move on. However, with key performance indicators, you can identify these loopholes, and accordingly seal them to enhance the efficiency of the robotic process.
Needless to say, the sole objective of implementing RPA in the workplace is to boost productivity and reduce costs. To achieve this, you need to continuously assess its performance to get the real image of the situation and improve it further.
RPA is no doubt indispensable when it comes to automating processes in an organization.
With the technology, you can be guaranteed high employee productivity, which means a high return on investment. By taking note of the common challenges that arise along the way, you can successfully implement RPA for your business.
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