What are the best practices for integrating RPA with BPM and workflow automation?

Aligning RPA with business goals is essential for success. RPA isn't a standalone solution; it's a part of broader process improvement. Before implementing, clarity is key. Identify suitable processes, benefits, risks, stakeholders, and metrics. Consider RPA's impact on workflows, systems, and people. Plan for change management and governance. RPA is a vital instrument in the orchestra of business strategy, each note resonating with the larger melody. It's about ensuring that every action, every process, contributes to the symphony of organizational success.

The first thing is to ensure that your processes are optimized. Secondly, ensure your processes are captured in a bpm tool that can integrate with your RPA platform. Thirdly, from a technical perspective ensure that the applications used by rpa automations have the right level of logging configured, as most bpm tools interrogate the log files. Lastly, ensure security and the right policies are in place for your bpm tool to access the logs. I would also say think about the cloud vs on-premise scenarios as those are likely to be encountered...

Before implementing RPA and BPM, thoroughly understand your existing processes. Document and analyze them to identify repetitive, rule-based tasks that can be automated with RPA. Determine the critical paths and dependencies in your workflows to optimize them with BPM.

To ensure maximum efficiency and compliance in your business processes, it is crucial to choose a Business Process Management (BPM) platform that offers in-depth integration with the most commonly used Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platforms. This integration enables the BPM platform to identify and address any shortcomings in the workflow, handle Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with ease, and provide comprehensive audit logging to ensure regulatory compliance and track any process issues. By leveraging the combined power of a BPM and RPA platform, your organization can achieve seamless end-to-end automation of your business processes, resulting in increased efficiency, productivity, and accuracy in your operations.

There is many ways to keep track of your RPA processes or BPM processes. In this particular scenario we write towards the idea of having monitoring enabled for RPA. I do not really think its different for other BPM processes though. Make sure metrics are accessible and visible for all of those who are involved in the field of RPA and or BPM processes. Make sure you have hardware/network resources visible to see if certain processes are memory leaking or anything of that kind. When you are just starting, focussing on KPI's is a waste of time, that should not be your focus. Make a BI dashboard that visualizes the savings of each BPM or RPA process execution. This will provide transparancy in global savings of your RPA/BPM initiative.