The Need to Scale RPA with an Automation Center of Excellence

Are companies maximizing their chance to successfully benefit from their RPA investment? Many companies are not leveraging the latest RPA best practices. Implementing an Automation Center of Excellence and a robust operating model will provide the foundation to help drive overall success in your automation objectives.

Prior to COVID-19, growth in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market was booming. Business and IT leaders were investing their time and dollars in RPA to benefit from improving productivity, reducing costs, and freeing up employees' time to work smarter. During COVID-19, companies were forced to implement technologies that address the new world we now live in. This has continued the momentum and growth in the RPA sector. The research report from Research and Markets shows that the RPA market in 2020 was valued at $2.039 billion and will have a compound annual rate of 31.5% from 2021 to 2026.

With the rush to benefit quickly from automation improvements, combined with RPA challenges, companies have not fully realized the expected benefits. To increase the RPA return on investment (ROI) and satisfy automation objectives, scaling RPA (based on best practices) to multiple business units and across the enterprise will dramatically help achieve automation goals. Though, instead of trying to scale via quick pin-point solutions, solving larger automation challenges will bring bigger gains. This requires RPA to be an important horizontal solution in larger digital transformation programs where Intelligent Automation brings together RPA, BPM, AI, Analytics and other leading products to satisfy complex problems.

To accomplish strategic automation objectives, a detailed and thoughtful game plan is necessary. Setting up an Automation Center of Excellence will help satisfy this approach and provide the roadmap to maximize your automation investment and goals. Automation COEs can help ensure expected ROI is achieved, provide and share best practices, sets the vision and strategy, implement and support a centralized technology platform, create and manage the governance model, champion RPA throughout the company, and provides training.

When setting up an Automation Center of Excellence, the type of organizational model is a key success factor. There are benefits and disadvantages to each model, but given that companies are all unique, different models can work. Here are 3 common Automation COE organizational models: Centralized, Decentralized, and Federated.

1) Automation Centralized Center of Excellence

Large enterprises usually start with a RPA proof of concept. Once this is successful, companies realize that it's best to plan properly and gather a team of experts and establish an Automation Centralized CoE.

During this initial phase, the centralized COE team usually spends time with 1 or 2 specific business units to satisfy specific automation requirements. This COE expert team is responsible for setting up and deploying a centralized RPA platform, along with a best practices delivery model, governance and support teams.

An Automation Centralized COE is an excellent step during the initial stages of the RPA journey. This sets the foundation and operational procedures to kick-start the automations. Though, when business units have the funding and desire to rapidly implement new automations, they are not happy when their automations are deprioritized due to other business unit priority automations. In addition, the centralized team can have resource concerns due to the demand and number of CoE resources.

2) Automation Decentralized Center of Excellence

Over the past several years, CIOs started to increase their investment in Robotic Process Automation. Business leaders started to see how automations can increase productivity, reduce costs, free up staff to work on more important tasks, reduce operational risk, and drive process improvements. Though, this led to an increase in duplicate, siloed, Decentralized Automation COEs within the same company.

For large enterprises that have very independent business units, it's generally acceptable to allow them to make their own strategic decisions. Though, having duplicate infrastructure and resources doing the exact same work increases costs substantially. Since these independent COEs are generally not talking with the other COEs, best practices and standards are not shared. While an individual business unit can have freedom and flexibility, global CIOs are not happy with the lack of enterprise-wide RPA ROI and increased costs. This type of model for large enterprises generally gets shut down over time due to lack of enterprise ROI.

3) Automation Federated Center of Excellence

One model for scaling RPA within large enterprises is to leverage a Federated Automation Center of Excellence, also called Hub & Spoke. It combines some of the best features of the Centralized and Decentralized models, which really allows companies to scale their automations.

The Federated Automation COE model usually offers a centralized platform, strategy, governance, operational support and best practices, while allowing different business units the power to prioritize and deliver their own automated solutions. As long as they follow the policy and procedures set forth by the core CoE, the business units are free to prioritize, develop and deliver automations on the centralized platform.

Allowing business units the flexibility and freedom to deliver automations at their own pace, while leveraging a centralized RPA platform, governance model and operational support team is a recipe for success. Implementing a Federated Automation CoE is one approach that can position companies to scale and increase automations across the company.

Documenting and communicating your vision, roadmap, and operating model in a well structured Automation Center of Excellence will lay the proper groundwork for success. This foundation will help position you to scale automations throughout your company, which will lead to increased RPA ROI.