Many giant enterprises are now looking for Digital Transformation trends and wish to apply the same in their own industry. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one of the much wanted technology that the enterprises wish to implement. Giant Enterprises want to automate their Business Processes by implementing Robotic Process Automation.
Here the questions is, can any process be automated?
No, you have few qualifiers for RPA, Robotic Process Automation. First of all the process needs to be visited, understood, reviewed and find out how many inter linked applications and departments are involved in the process, whether by implementing RPA, is the ROI going to increase? Being the Business Owner /Process Owner, You need to understand the process selection for RPA implementation. You might have automated your business by means of ERPs, Customized Suits or through CRM and other applications during the course of office automation. Now the question arises, still why so employees are working manually and why the inter-department tasks are communicated manually. Even after implementing ERPs and other means, why so many manual efforts are poured in for generating reports? Still at the end of the day, you have a question, ‘Is the Data Accurate?’ Here comes the answer! Identify those processes, that are consuming a lot manual efforts, and type of data that is collected or mined during the activity and out of these activities, which one needs to be automated first.
So, Process Selection automation involves a series of steps as follows:
• Take simple introspection of your business activities. Find out the activity where the business functions or IT teams spend most of their efforts.
• Scrutinize the data that can be gathered during these activities. Data can be in any form, so classify the data type, is it in physical format, PDF reports, or Database, web publish or MIS reports for management.
• Volume of data, frequency of the activity and SLAs, if any in terms of hours
• Business value for the activity in terms of expenditure as well as returns
• Number of manual hours spent on daily basis, number of man power working on the process
• How many applications are involved in completing the activity, and their environment
• Type of data that is used as input in the activity and its format (physical, structured/unstructured, database, Excel/PDF, Emails, Web data etc.)
• What is the percentage of work done based on business rules.
• Is the activity stalls for judgmental calls?
• Is data in handwritten format?
These are few questions to be answered before deciding for RPA Journey. Now you have statistical data of Business Activity and you have collected data for Process inputs, technical aspects/feasibility and the volume of data in terms of efforts and density. Derive an equation to find out where the FTEs are spending their time or being in a RPA consultant to help you in Process Selection for RPA. Once the Processes are identified for automation, the next step would be process prioritization. Process assessment allows you to identify workflow efficiency and improve accuracy and quality across all departments. Scalability and flexibility are main concerns as few processes can be much easy to automate with less complexity than others.
Conclusion:
Process selection for automation is an important and transformational decision since this is going to improve your day-to-day operations to next level. This is first step towards digital transformation as it is an organizational prototype shift that transfers processes away from legacy systems to a more efficient technological and functional structure.
