RPA - Solution Implementation Life Cycle

There is no doubt. Robot Process Automation (or RPA) has been one of the disruptive technologies that have fastly revolutionized the Business 4.0. Looking from the technical point of view, an RPA Developer seeks for requirements that shall be converted into deliverables for the customers they are serving.

In most general terms, a RPA-based solution can be seen like a Project (of big, small or medium size) and as such it can be d in described through the followings 6 phases:

1. Discovery

Here the Project is not already on his way, user stories are asked, requirements are needed and a list of constraints is gathered. This is the the moment of "Why" rather than then the "How". Why do we (the company) need to automate this particular process? Reasons might be multiple and all of them are linked to time/cost saving logics. From the service provider point of view the question is : "Which tasks would you like to automate?" which corresponds to the need of gathering the input from the client. A simple example of request from a company could be to automate the task of extracting the data from an Excel file according to some conditions and storing the extracted data into another Excel.

The discovery Phase is made up by two sub-phases:

• To performs analysis on client requirements (Feasability Study)
• If feasable, the business proposal is offered (alongside with the quotation)

The Process Architect is the professional in charge to "bridge" between the customer's request and solution provider. He will be managing the process of the Feasability Study and the Business Proposal, by identifying the core requirements to host, support and run the solution on specific architectures, so that for specific tasks, one will have certain requirements.

In the case of affirmative feasability, the complexity is measured. This involves in having a clear picture of the dependencies and inter-dependencies and how the solution might affect the network of the enterprise's processes. A clear vision of the benefits coming from the adoption of the RPA solution shall be delivered to the client. Examples of beneift are shown below.

In the case of negative feasability, a list of reasons why to automate that specific task is not possible shall be communicated to the client.

2. Solution Design

In this phase, the Solution Architect has proper meetings with the Technical Architect in which they discuss how to implement the solution and produce a Process Definition Document, which contains information about each process step by step.

After this, Project constraints are set: Budget, Nr. of People working on that Project, Time and so on.

The next step is to Design and Represent in a clear way an Object Model Flowchart, representing the complete flow of the automated process.

The fourth step is to choose the Tool that will be used to implement the RPA Solution. Some of the most popular are UiPath, BluePrism, Automation Anywhere.

3. Development

Receiving as Input the Process Definition Document, the RPA Developer will produce the Process Automation Script which lists all the equivalent code commands to be executed in order to perform the single tasks showed in the above picture.

4. UAT (Testing Phase)

Testing is performed by the Process owner in a specific pre-production enviroment to check whether the RPA developers have delievered the correct solution whose the client will benefit of. Is the phase where the errors and bugs are rectified and changes are implemented in the Development environment.

5. Deployment

Finally the bot is deployed into the production environment and the users (company or end-users) can potentially use it for their business purposes.

6. Bot Execution

The Bot is finally ready to be executed. User Interfaces might be additionally developed using Visual Basic language.