The Evolution of an RPA CoE

As opposed to the common misbelief, Robotic Process Automation does not just happen overnight and taking over all our business processes to make organisations faster and more efficient. Without rushing its progress, it needs to follow particular steps to become a sustainable part of our businesses, unless we'd like to fight completely unprepared with an uncontrolled RPA initiative that has proliferated into a disastrous cancer.

Groundwork

RPA needs some certain amount of groundwork before we can even plan our initiative properly. In the beginning, it needs fully structured digital data that goes through well-thought-out and well-documented processes.

Before even getting to know about robots, we had our own ways to optimise our way of working and automate our repetitive tasks. Process Notes helped us to retain knowledge on how we operate, and with well-structured Excel files, we managed to analyse vast amount of data in a matter of seconds. We also built VBA macros to somewhat help us with navigating the MS Office suite faster.

These elements above are absolutely crucial first steps towards operational excellence, given that if we missed them in the past, we need to do the extra work once we start our robotic projects.

The Foundation

What makes a strong RPA foundation? A well-trained and competent team, a great RPA tool with stable infrastructure, and a methodology that ensures a seamless delivery. Although it seems as simple as that, it worth to note that not many of the RPA initiatives are getting it right first time.

It is absolutely critical to equally focus on all three of these components, as lacking either of them would result in short term failures and not many success stories.

In addition of setting up the CoE properly, you need a strong management commitment coming from C-level executives, or this will only be a siloed initiative that cannot extend beyond a certain scope.

At this phase, we usually start with utilising the benefits of the groundwork we conducted earlier, so simple processes are getting automated with digital data in-and-outputs.

Adding Enhancements

We quite quickly come to the conclusion that most of our processes need a human touch either by digitalising inputs or by making particular sub-steps we don't yet have the technology that can comprehend them at this phase.

At some companies, they call this phase as Intelligent Automation, but in my opinion we only give crutches to our disabled technology, so it will be able to conduct more than its inherent capability enables.

The enhancements we need to add are Intelligent Document Processing and a Workflow tool to overcome these obstacles.

Comprehensive Transformations

Workflow tools enables us to make front-to-back and end-to-end process automations, yet RPA focuses on particular tasks that are conducted at a specific division of the company. As a next step, we must extend our scope to see through our bottlenecks throughout the company, and transforming core end-to-end processes by considering RPA and its connected tools as an enabler, because speeding up sub-steps doesn't mean that the process as a whole will be faster. By doing so, we can provide excellent service to our customers in the long run.

Advanced Process Automation

This phase is still yet to come within the RPA sector, but we can see some initial attempts that can serve as good indicator about what's coming up next.

Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technologies are still advancing, so the next logical step is to connect them with our automation infrastructure. By this stage, most data will become available digitally that serves as an input for these algorithms.

We'll get to the point within the next decade when these technologies above will be available as drag-and-drop solutions, so the upskilling of the automation team will need to include the fundamentals on how they can utilise the capabilities of these technologies to solve business process related obstacles that remained before reaching this phase.

Where do you stand with your Automation CoE? What is your next step in this journey? Have you ever jumped two phases at a time? How did you manage to enhance your capability to support and sustain that jump? I'm interested in reading your stories.

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