Navigating RPA Complexity: Strategic Approaches to Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Summary

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can transform business operations by enhancing efficiency and reducing costs whenever a successful implementation is in place.

Incorrect implementation, however, can result in significant operational setbacks and financial losses.

This article outlines the critical success factors for RPA deployment, including strategic process selection, comprehensive risk assessment, and collaborative implementation across departments.

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Introduction

RPA is a transformative technology that can elevate your company's operational efficiency.

When implemented correctly, RPA will:

• Help you to reduce errors in streamlined processes across business departments.
• Transform the focus of your business analysts to do analysis into their workday.
• Scale up operations without breaking the budget or proportionally pulling new resources.

Conversely, missing RPA requirements risks:

• Relegating analysts to mere support roles, tasked primarily with mitigating process failures.
• Can incur substantial financial losses due to inaccurately projected licensing expenses.

For a process to be automated, our experience gave us at least four requisites:

• A business process that makes strategical sense to scale up, to increase volume or reduce errors.
• A preliminary assessment to understand how, why, and when it may encounter issues (referred to as process exceptions).
• A team of business analysts, not only your IT department or services provider, to guide through the design, training, and testing, until is stabilized.
• An accurate licensing scenario, planning for compliance and future growth.

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A business process that makes sense to be automated

The main variables to consider are the time spent by people performing the task, the criticality of the output, and how well the steps involved in the process are understood.

As an example, we recently automated a process that involved the draft generation of several types of contracts, their filling, internal approval process, and electronic signature by the counterparts.

Math was very straightforward:

• Company makes 80 to 100 contracts per month.
• Creating the file and filling it requires 15 minutes on average, per document.
• The approval process requires the document being handle by email, with eventual reminders to be approved. Around 30 minutes in average.
• Then, it needed to be sent through an electronic signature platform, this time DocuSign. After the completion, the document needed to be saved into a compliance repository. Another 30 minutes in average.

In total, each contract requires an average of 75 minutes: 6750 minutes per month: 112 hours: 80% of the total time of an analyst.

According to Eurostat, the average annual full-time adjusted salary for employees in the EU was €33.500 in 2021. [1]

That’s your first ballpark estimation: € 26.800 could be saved per year, after the process is stabilized.

How, when, and why it will break.

Because it will, so we should have a clear understanding about the process exceptions.

Following with the contract automation RPA project, many were detected early on:

• What happens when we need manual input into a document?
• Do we always have all data to fill the documents? Do we need to hide those sections or mark it for manually review?
• What happens if an approval request misses the deadline? Shall the process be restarted?
• Will be subject to licensing limits, as quantity of envelopes per month?
• What happens when the unexpected exception not assessed in this analysis happens?

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Each exception should be quantified, scheduled (when it’s most probable to happen) and mitigated.

On few occasions, it could make sense to wait for the project to get started, to solve these problems from their base, instead of developing custom solutions to handle the exceptions.

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A team involved in the RPA project should include more than just the IT department.

A business process to be automated requires a team consisting of:

• Businesspeople, who understand how, when, and why the RPA will operate.
• Automation team, including your IT department and sometimes external help, given the scale or complexity of the process.
• The final users, who will become trainers of the process, as they know how to solve the problems that will arise.

Based on our experience deploying RPA’s, the variety of roles participating in a project is often a reliable predictor of the project's overall success.

An accurate licensing scenario, planning for compliance and future growth.

Pareto theorem applies everywhere, and licensing costs and project timelines are no exception, even for RPA projects.

Summing up our contract automation RPA project, we ended with a variety of costs:

• RPA software licensing, in our case Microsoft Power Automate.
• DocuSign API license, the electronic signature suite used to complete the envelopes.
• RPA development costs, our fees for the project.
• Availability of people at the company we helped. Because if someone is training the RPA, someone else shall be doing their work.

Undertaking a comprehensive licensing assessment is crucial for strategic planning and risk management. This evaluation allows for informed decision-making, ensuring the project's viability and preparing for any contingencies.

This approach extends to evaluating the extent of process exceptions that can be realistically managed.

We conduct a thorough evaluation of the solution and its associated costs. This includes an in-depth analysis of the expenses involved in managing each exception, providing recommendations on the most technically and economically feasible solutions to pursue.

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For instance, licensing for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) within the Microsoft ecosystem can follow two models:

• Interactive Actions: Designed for tasks requiring emulation of human actions, such as data entry in legacy systems.
• Service-to-Service Integrations: Suitable for automated workflows between digital platforms, where no human interaction is required.

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Based on interactive actions

This model is tailored for workflows that require the emulation of human actions, such as interfacing with legacy systems as proprietary software or ERP within the corporate network.

However, to optimize licensing costs, it’s essential to establish a precise schedule. This is because only one workflow operation can execute at any given moment.

Such scheduling is particularly effective for tasks that need to occur at specific times each day.

For our business case, this type of RPA is indispensable when direct system interaction must mimic exact human input, for example, entering data in a dialog box that cannot be automated through standard programming interfaces.

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Based on service-to-service integrations

When APIs are already established to facilitate system interactions within an organization, tasks can be automated without the need for direct user input.

In such cases, licensing is typically structured on a per-user or per-workflow basis. This approach is prevalent, as it allows for a majority of workflows to be streamlined.

In our application, we've successfully automated entire processes by utilizing service-to-service integrations.

Platforms like Microsoft 365 and DocuSign are instrumental in this strategy, providing the necessary interfaces for automation without manual intervention.

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Questions to help to understand the most probable scenario

To determine the most effective automation approach for your business, consider these operational factors:

If your operations involve:

• Activities that replicate detailed human actions.
• Cases where the process should take a consultive decision making step.

You might benefit from a hands-on automation model that mirrors human interaction.

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Conversely, if your business has:

• Operations that involve different systems where transferring information or tasks could be automated.
• Tasks that are repetitive and do not need human decision-making each time they are performed.
• Regular use of business platforms that may already offer automation options.

You could take advantage of a more streamlined, hands-off automation approach.

Answering these questions will guide you towards the automation strategy that best fits your operational model, enhancing efficiency and potentially reducing costs.

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Conclusion

Robotic Process Automation is not just a tool—it's a game-changer that redefines the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of business operations. The key to harnessing its transformative potential lies in:

• Selecting processes that deliver strategic scalability and error reduction.
• Conducting a robust risk assessment to preemptively tackle process exceptions.
• Fostering a cross-departmental collaboration that integrates diverse expertise.

Embrace RPA with a strategic, informed approach, and you'll not only avoid the pitfalls but also set the stage for significant growth and a sharper competitive edge.

[1] Eurostat average salary: New indicator on annual average salaries in the EU - Products Eurostat News - Eurostat (europa.eu)