From Ideas to Impact: Harnessing UiPath’s Automation Hub for RPA Excellence

Overview

These days it seems everyone is eager for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to accelerate their organization’s adoption of automation. Many organizations, however, are finding that a wide-scale rollout of RPA technologies can be tricky. As organizations expand their practice, questions seem to multiply faster than answers. Who should be involved, and to what extent? How can we manage the automation of high-scope business processes to ensure our solutions meet the expectations of our business users? And how can we maintain and manage a steady pipeline of opportunities that will generate a positive ROI? Not to mention the challenges of ensuring proper hypercare and maintenance across all of our projects once they have been implemented.

For organizations using UiPath to anchor their RPA program, the clear answer may be their collaborative platform, Automation Hub. Automation Hub is a UiPath web-based platform that serves as a centralized hub for managing, governing, and scaling automation initiatives within an organization. It provides a collaborative environment for capturing automation ideas, prioritizing them, and tracking their progress throughout the automation lifecycle. This tool has a variety of features to enable all stakeholders to get involved in building the culture of automation that is required to maximize the returns that can be generated with RPA.

With a bottom-up method of sourcing ideas and a top-down method of reviewing and reporting the outcomes of an organization's projects, Automation Hub is a one-stop-shop that will engage every employee, technical and otherwise, through the progression of automations across every department. But how do we deploy a tool that amply meets the needs of enterprises with ambitions to scale their RPA practices both vertically and horizontally across their organization? Deploying such a wide-reaching tool can be a daunting task. So what does it take? How can we bring the pieces together to ensure smooth implementation of a product that will be so central to the operations of a CoE? And, perhaps most importantly, can I change the theme between light mode and dark mode? In this article, we will dive into all that and more, to see how harnessing Automation Hub can allow ideas within your organization to drive massive returns and impact.

Five Steps to Implementing an Automation Idea

Automation Hub serves as a centralized platform for managing, governing, and scaling automation projects. It enables collaboration between business users, process owners, and automation developers, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. The platform offers a range of features designed to streamline the automation lifecycle, promote reusability, and enhance project management. But how does it achieve this? When looking at UiPath’s “Five Steps to Implementing an Automation Idea,” a clearer picture unfolds of how Automation Hub can be so powerful.

Idea

Every automation starts as an idea. Sometimes crude and unformed, many ideas can be poor candidates for automation, but suppressing ideas can prevent us from recognizing ideas that may be prime to generate fantastic outcomes. With Automation Hub, ideas can be submitted regardless of the submitter’s expertise in the subject area, or their clarity for how automating such a process may look. There are four methods for submitting ideas in Automation Hub:

Employee-driven ideas are available to any user and require a limited amount of information to submit, as submitters are less likely to carry enough expertise to fully flesh out their ideas.

CoE-driven ideas can only be submitted by authorized users, such as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), RPA Business Analysts, Process Owners, etc. These users can be expected to have a deeper understanding of the process and are therefore required to provide more details when submitting ideas.This means it takes a little bit more work to submit the idea, but these ideas can bypass early approval processes as configured in Automation Hub’s administrative settings.

The third and fourth methods for idea submisison are through UiPath’s Process Mining and Task Mining tools. Without leaving their page, analysts using these tools can select parts of a process or task and fill out a sidebar with details about the process or idea for automatic upload to the idea board in Automation Hub. Designated reviewers of automation ideas can then choose to approve or reject any submitted ideas based on their candidacy.

Assessment

Once idea submissions are complete and approved, they can be further examined in the second step, Assessment. In this step, we review the scope of the automation and the technology required to implement it. We can rely on the process owner to provide deeper insights about the process and customize our standards for assessment to ensure we are collecting exactly the information we will need to evaluate the feasibility of automating submitted ideas in our organization. The automation idea profile will display the information provided in the idea submission.

During the assessment phase, we dive deeper into this profile to gain a more complete understanding of the requirements of the idea. The idea profile covers six areas of the automation beyond the information that is included in the initial idea submission:

• Cost-Benefit Analysis automatically calculates the net benefits of automating the process.
• Documentation stores any files and links uploaded by the submitter and any collaborators to provide further details and documentation about the automation.
• Components allows Process Owners and Project managers to add reusable components that will be helpful in the implementation of the idea to the automation’s idea profile.
• Collaborators lists the users who have collaborated on the idea as well as the roles that said users play throughout the life of that automation.
• Change Requests hosts any requests submitted to change the way the process or automation should function.
• History tracks all the changes made to the automation idea, in detail, since its conception and submission.

All of these pieces remain attached to the automation idea profile through all five steps to implementation and are continuously updated by various collaborators as necessary, even after the automation has been deployed to production and is in hypercare.

Qualification

After assessment is completed, decision-makers can set the priority of automation ideas. This step is represented in the “Decision pipeline” tab on the “Automation pipeline” page in Automation Hub. From this tab, statistics and the submission information can be reviewed for any ideas that have completed review in the Assessment step and are waiting to move forward to implementation.

The dashboard in this tab allows us to select different automation idea profiles and do direct comparisons between various aspects of the ideas in order to make educated decisions about where priorities should lay. If the "powers that be" wish to prioritize cutting costs in a given quarter, we can filter the idea profiles to only show automations where cost is the primary goal instead of productivity. If the HR department has lost some employees and is struggling to keep up, we can further filter to only examine automation ideas within the HR department.

The Qualification step helps to determine which automation ideas need to be the immediate priority for our organization. Ideas expected to have the greatest impact should be pushed to Implementation first.

Implementation

Implementation is perhaps the most labor intensive step. This is where development occurs. And with it, lots of documentation is completed. UiPath breaks it down into four sub-steps: Analysis, Solution Design, Development, and Testing. Each sub-step is accompanied by a new collaborator, bringing with them documentation that must be completed before handing the automation off to their next collaborator.

In Analysis, a Business Analyst will gather any outstanding process information in order to generate the Process Design Document (PDD).

Once the process is clearly defined and documented, it moves on to Solution Design. In this sub-step, the Solution architect is tasked with designing a solution for the process and thoroughly documenting said solution in a Solution Design Document (SDD).

With a clear solution provided, developers can then get to work on Development. Any technical specifications that arise during Development must be documented by the RPA developers in this sub-step.

Once the automation is fully developed, it moves to the final sub-step, Testing. Testers are added as collaborators to the automation so that they may test the completed solution and ensure it is ready for production. We can configure any standard testing documentation to be completed during this sub-step as well.

Live

When fully documented, developed, and tested, an automation is ready for production. Once deployed in the production environment, an automation is considered “Live,” the fifth and final step in implementing automation ideas. In this step, automations are monitored primarily by the business users.

Performance analytics are automatically generated according to your configurations in the admin settings of Automation Hub. This unlocks on-demand reporting capabilities that allow users and management to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of their initiatives. We then have custom insights and metrics to track impact, including cost savings, increases in productivity, error reduction, and more.

Bug fixes, change requests, etc. can be reported by the users on the automation’s profile in Automation Hub. This will notify collaborators that there is a task to be completed with the automation, and maintenance can begin immediately. Not only are developers informed as soon as there is work to be done on an automation, but the users can follow the progress of the developers to stay up to date while they wait.

Customization

Automation Hub's pipeline management for automation, from idea to impact, is an incredible capability. However, it still does not capture the full potential for adding value that the tool can provide. Value can be generated exponentially utilizing the various options UiPath offers for customization.

Custom dashboards allow the creation, visualization, and reporting of preferred statistics in the format that best suits the business. Administrators have a wealth of “Platform Setup” settings to adjust, which can easily be grouped by their functionality. Some settings help with organization of resources in Automation Hub, others with setting standards for evaluation, and yet others with enabling connectivity to the Automation Hub instance.

Organization

In addition to a range of user roles that are standard in Automation Hub, administrators can create new roles and customize their permissions according to the roles that exist in your organization.

Categories allow the creation of a customized layered categorization of automation opportunities according to the Business Areas of their organization, the operational Categories within said business areas, and even further with Sub-Categories inside of those.

App Inventory tracks all applications that the automation team interacts with, the source which first incorporated the application (User, Admin, or otherwise), the business areas that use it, and the version of the application that is deployed by the organization.

Manage Components facilitates oversight of the reusable automation components that are to be made available to the organization. Uploaded components are given a profile which can be reviewed, edited, archived, or deleted as necessary by users in the Admin role.

Evaluation

Documentation provides a repository for documentation templates. Use of the documentation templates setup can be a key to creating uniformity in the organization’s documentation across different collaborators and automation idea profiles. Additionally, these templates can be easily pulled as needed by collaborators in order to save time and speed up the progression of ideas through the pipeline.

Custom Assessments allow administrators to designate what information should be included for different assessments that are done throughout the life of automations. New assessments can be created, and administrators can always append questions, references, or even Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) to the forms that employees are expected to complete so they may ensure that desired information has been provided in any assessment phases before, during, or after the automation’s life-cycle.

Cost Setup gives the opportunity to adjust the numbers used when automated cost-benefit analyses are generated. Vendor costs, people costs, running software costs, and other running costs can be added, deleted, or edited as needed from this menu.

Connectivity

Import Pipeline automates the importing of any existing pipeline documentation from an external source into Automation Hub idea profiles by simply uploading a CSV filled with the details of a list of automation ideas and their properties.

Open API setup gives API token generation a home to help track API calls made unto the organization’s Automation Hub instance.

Connection setups for Orchestrator, Insights, and Jira make incorporating these integral technologies for RPA implementation to the Automation Hub instance incredibly easy. Any issues with connectivity between them can easily be remedied within these menus to maintain harmony across the automation team’s technical environment for enablement.

Key Takeaways

With such a robust offering, odds are that any organization with ambitions to scale their automation practice would benefit greatly from implementing Automation Hub. Of course, organizations employing other RPA softwares besides UiPath won’t be able to make anything of this tool. But the simplicity that it creates for managing the growth of automation practices is unmatched, and yet another reason why such organizations may want to seriously consider transitioning to UiPath as their go-to implementation software for RPA projects.

While Automation Hub can be far-reaching, its capabilities can still provide tremendous value if used by smaller groups or teams within an organization. For example, a company whose ambitions are limited to a small RPA team managing processes within themselves (and minimizing interaction with non-technical teams) would still experience an increase in both quality and velocity by organizing and automating the steps to implementation that tend to bog down developers.

That said, encouraging widespread adoption and engaging employees throughout the organization will maximize the returns created by Automation Hub and foster a culture of automation that is sure to increase productive capacity.

To best deploy Automation Hub, engage stakeholders and promote adoption at all levels. Including senior management, process owners, automation developers, and even business users. Secure their buy-in and provide ample time and training to ensure successful adoption of the technology. Foster a collaborative environment that encourages active participation and knowledge sharing. Any organization which does this right will quickly find themselves at the pinnacle of RPA Excellence.

Oh, and changing between a dark and light mode can be done in any user’s general preferences under their profile! Like many of UiPath’s customization features, it’s really that easy. Happy automating!