Success Factors For Increasing ROI On RPA Investment

For accelerating digital transformation to the next level, many organizations are embracing software bots or digital bots and automating repetitive and error-prone processes. To capitalize on their investment on RPA technology, those organizations are considering to scale these solutions with artificial intelligence to go beyond the daily routine tasks automation and perform contextual decision based tasks.

Recently, Deloitte surveyed on RPA strategies and its impact on their employees. The respondents included 523 executives from various industries in more than 25 countries across Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The analysis found that 58% of executives have started their automation journey. Enterprises believe that they can now respond faster to changing business scenarios and support growth plans by automating various back-end and front-end business processes. It also empowers them in increasing their capacity with higher speed, transparency, and accuracy.

Depending on how different bots work and their limitations, enterprises are seeking to adopt attended, unattended, and hybrid RPA model and optimize their resources and productivity at each step of the organization. As attended bots are mostly used in front-office tasks by collaborating bots with employees and teams while unattended bots are successful in supporting back-end processes.

Key Success Factors

Enterprises need to incorporate key factors in their planning and execution of RPA projects for successful business outcomes and achieving a higher return on investment.

Preparing Workforce

According to the Deloitte survey, over 90% of organizations were expected to increase their workforce capacity by deploying automation bots. Hence, it is important enterprises reskill their human workforce for new roles they will be involved in and how they will work along with the bots to leverage the enhanced work capacity. It will not help in streamlining the flow of work processes only but eliminate the perception of losing jobs in the human workforce.

Redefining Work

As a result of intelligent automation, enterprises need to redefine KPIs of work the way they will be changed and executed. As the employees free from performing repetitive tasks will be engaged in solving challenging business problems and other creative roles. It should add more value to business and customers, therefore, the KPIs should include factors that can measure the value of enhanced capacity and efficiency.

RPA Implementation Partner

The skills required to automate are hard to find and costly as 59% of surveyed executives who were starting their pilot automation project believe they lack the workforce capacity and skills needed. However, in recent years, the emergence of RPA service providers like Eastern Software Systems, are successful in assisting enterprises in implementing and scaling automation of their work processes by consulting them about RPA opportunities, and the right technology platform and tools to leverage them.

AI-driven RPA Applications

To achieve the complete potential of intelligent automation, enterprises are combining RPA with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables applications beyond collecting and processing data to analyze and make contextual decisions. It helps business leaders to achieve a new level of automation and unlock the possibilities RPA can be used for.

RPA Technology

When evaluating RPA Technology platform like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, it is important for organizations to check the software’s compatibility with their existing systems. As in some of the cases, RPA technology providers find trouble in utilizing Google Chrome, rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer for web-based processes. Hence, it is imperative that the RPA project management team includes comprehensive IT requirements and consider aspects such as technical support, security and data standards, maintenance, licensing fees, implementation costs, and hardware and software requirements.

The adoption of RPA is growing across industries and countries, and many organizations are seeking to bring in AI-driven RPA applications and tools to deploy end-to-end automation for increasing customer satisfaction and employee efficiency while reducing operational costs. However, if enterprises don't know why they need RPA and how to implement that, they could end up with a failed project. It’s better to consult first with the RPA service provider as they have specialized talent and skills to implement intelligent automation seamlessly.