Part III: (What) Processes to Automate with RPA to get a high ROI.

Whenever one makes an investment, they expect not just a return but a decent return. This is the same for IT Investments. When justifying ICT Investments to the leadership, it is very important to elaborate what Return on Investment is expected and this expectation in turn then drives the internal discussion on what exactly we need to put our investments into. This is the same for RPA.

There are situations where organizations simply dive into technology because it is the latest but having the latest tech-toy in town doesn’t mean anything if it is not meeting any need and value for money is not realized. Knowing why and when to deploy RPA is good but of greater importance is to know what exactly we intend to automate as these are the specific customer touch-points where the improved or transformed customer experience is to be delivered. Some considerations to bear in mind as you decide what to automate include: -

Standardized /Rule Based Processes: The same way we give job descriptions to staff, we also have to tell bots what to do. The instructions we give bots are in terms of business logic, what application to open, what data to collect, what to do with that data etc. The process picked for automation has to have very clear rules on what is expected to be done to achieve the objective of efficiency in the first place. If the process involves a lot of subjectivity with no clear rules then it would not be valuable to automate this process.

Repetitive Processes: Not all processes in an organization are good candidates for RPA. Remember the idea of Robotics is to take away the repetitive mundane tasks from staff to allow them to engage in more mentally stimulating activities and therefore the process picked for automation, needs to have tasks that are repeated over and over again and takes a lot of time to perform. If you have a process you run once a month and it takes you 10 minutes to do so, this process may not make sense to robotize. On the flip side, if we pick a process like claims processing in the financial services sector as an example, it would make sense to automate this. Typically, the volume of claims to be processed daily is substantial with many people performing the same process of extracting data from claim forms and feeding these into information systems for processing.

 High Volume: The reason staff get bored is by doing the same thing over and over again over a long period of time meaning requests keep streaming in as they work. Take for instance, an e-commerce business where customers can make orders at any time of the day or night and these orders need to be processed. These types of processes are good candidates for RPA due to the volume of transactions to be processed and the processing can be done at any time of the day as they are not dependent on people for processing.

Electronic Start and End Points: When selecting the processes to be automated, it is important to note that the processes are not completely manual with no digital aspects or digital record. Remember RPA needs to work with data in digital format interacting with systems as humans would. In some cases it is possible to layer RPA with other technologies like Optical Character Readers (OCR) to take care of manual forms however, for bots to work the process needs to have electronic start and end points.

Data Intensive Processes: One of the benefits of employing a virtual workforce is increased accuracy when processing data. It therefore follows that a great RPA candidate from a process perspective are data intensive processes as chances of the human making errors are high.

Complex IT Landscape: In every organization there are always systems (no matter how complex or simple they may be) that handle some specific set of processes. However, to drive better experience both internally and external to the organization, these systems need to exchange data. This can be achieved through integration platforms and API’s. In some cases, the technology landscape may consist of some legacy systems where integration may become a challenge. This scenario presents a good candidate for RPA.

While the characteristics mentioned above are some of the pointers to consider, more often than not the final process candidate for the automation may embody one or more of these characteristics. It is also worth noting that once the processes have been selected, some introspection around the process and the efficiency of the process needs to be evaluated even before automation to ensure that the said inefficiencies are not automated.

The Kaizen philosophy needs to be alive as we select the process to automate, asking questions like why do we do what we do? What do we want to achieve? What risks are we managing? What controls do we need to have in place? Are there areas of repetition/ waste that we need to eliminate? etc help us understand our processes much better. Many times, the process can always be improved and made leaner and once the process has been redesigned with these principles in mind, then deploying an RPA solution would deliver the intended benefits and give the expected Returns on Investment. As Bill gates says “The first rule of any technology in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency!” As you select what automate ensure process re-engineering is a key part of automation journey to get best out of your RPA Investment.