Doing the ‘Right’ Automation and Delivering the Automation ‘Right’ – A Perspective
Automation is not new to humans since the times of invention of ’Wheel’. It has peaked to highest levels in the current era of ChatGPT et al., progressively everywhere from the times of Industrial Revolution, Mechanisation, Computerization, and Digitization eras. Sadly, sometimes, in a great hurry, IT automation projects are kick started in an organization, without proper feasibility and viability. This Blog is about a perspective on ‘Automation’ initiatives and enlists few views on “Doing the Right Automation and delivering the Automation Right”.
1.?????Calf Path story – a Case in point
As the ‘Calf Path’ story goes, it was said that one day in primeval times, a calf walked and reached home by trial and error and traversing back and forth around same area in the forest leaving footprints in the ground creating “Pathway”. Tracing the same footsteps, other animals, herdsmen, hunters, started using it in the forest day and night. As the path is used by many for a prolonged period, it became a regular way, a popular lane and finally approved road / highway for commuting across the forest and as an acceptable track for transportation though it is not a straight path but kinked one.?
Similarly, in organizations, many a business process steps would have been created and followed and have become part of SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) similar to ‘calf path’, having redundant steps, additional data captures, multiple approval steps etc.,. While the opportunities to improve the process would be evident to many, there could many reasons why this could not have been improved over a period of time.
As part of digital transformation journey and possible automation initiatives, such business processes may have been identified for a RPA project. In this scenario, the question arises – “Are we doing right by automating such business process, which is riddled with inefficiency and redundancy straight away”?. The answer is obviously ‘No’ but teams have to first optimise the business process steps and then take it up for automation than automating a suboptimum business process. Prior to the automation, one must study the business processes and optimise the steps, merge/combine the steps, eliminate redundant steps and there after redesign of the business process before proceeding to automation.
2.??????Doing a Right Robotic Process Automation Project starts with optimized business process.
Recently I was attending a workshop where in a process automation between two different ERPs was implemented (a kind of RPA) to automatically retrieve the transactions independently in each of the ERPs and then reconcile the differences in the financial transactions values without human intervention thereby eliminating the error records in both systems. While this is excellent RPA implementation, there was apparently no effort to study as to why the discrepancies in the financial transactions (error records) between the two ERPs are arising and how to minimize/eliminate them first, at source itself. Once the respective processes in both ERPs have been optimized to minimize the error records, RPA implementation has to be taken up. This way the business processes are optimized and the RPA solution also is an effective and efficient tool and the results will be long lasting and adoption of the RPA will be quicker.
Hence embarking on automation initiatives on the right business processes, which have been optimized (non-technology improvements) and are stable for a period of time, is a must for the success of the RPA Implementation.
3.??????Right RPA Project is to dehumanize repeatable tasks into Robotic tasks through RPA
Business processes having a repeatable definitive workflow with a clear decision rule with high transaction volumes are a straight case for Process Automation. As some experts’ quote – Robotic process automation (RPA) is applicable to all business process where humans are doing routine robotic operations. RPA is all about – pulling out the ‘ROBOTIC Tasks’ in such business tasks done by humans and allowing them for more intelligent operations!??
We were doing a project where in 30,000+pages of an obsolete content management system were being archived into a simple archival system so that needed pages can be retrieved when necessary.?The operations consist of - opening a page in the current system and then selecting the contents and thereafter archiving with a primary key in the new storage file system and repeat the operation for all pages. Each page archival would take about 10 min to 14 minutes.??The workload is humongous (30 to 36 person months of effort), routine activity and requires a structured repetitive step for developers to execute it for long periods of time and it would take couple of months of Project Effort. The fatigue and monotonous activity would reduce the productivity and also results in defects in the archival output.
This was a perfect opportunity to automate the process steps using a RPA tool and was delivered in successfully.
Once we have selected the right business process based on the above criteria, let us see how to deliver the Automation right!
4.??????Delivering the Robotic Process Automation Projects ‘Right’ :
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Apart from the customer support by way of commitment, change management and sponsor’s oversight, IT Automation projects require the following best practices to get the solution ‘Right’.
a.??????Right Platform and Programming Techniques
Many a times, the RPA projects are executed with technologies which are familiar to the project teams than that are aligned to the customer technological landscape. It is important to know the customer short term pains and long-term plans to introduce and recommend the right RPA platform which is scalable, integrates with the their IT systems. The RPA project teams have to adopt the right coding techniques and develop a framework enabling the reuse of the components across the customer business processes and projects.
b.??????Long term Road Map
Though the Automation Initiatives typically are kick started with a simple project having low hanging fruits (Immediate benefits) , the project plan should consider the opportunities to expand the scope to related business processes, future needs and long term road map of the customers’ automation initiatives. In the absence of a long-term road map, each RPA project may become localized solution and cannot reused and integrated across the organization.
c.??????Support beyond development
Automation initiatives are tightly coupled with business processes. Any changes to business processes due to external factors require immediate fine tuning of the solution and the release of the next version of the RPA into production. For this, project teams have to necessarily support the solution as part of change management and increase acceptability among the business users. Unless process scalability and process stability is established for a reasonable period, RPA solution shelf life will be limited and there is high probability for the business users to go back to manual steps.
d.??????Key Performance metrics of RPA
The true test to declare whether we have delivered the RPA project right or not is only by measuring the key business metrics such as Business KPIs, ROI, accuracy, defect reduction, improved productivity, reliability of the tool always, regulatory compliance needs, cycle time reduction etc. The improvement in these performance metrics (KPIs) and business goals would instill confidence in business users and fuel to invest further in newer opportunities of RPA projects.
In summary, ‘Doing right automation’ and then ‘Delivering automation right’ go hand in hand to get the best results.?To achieve this, one has to optimize the business processes first and thereafter deliver the solution right by selection of the appropriate tools and techniques. This cyclic paradigm goes back to beginning repeats itself from project to project!
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