Scaling successfully - what would you have said? You have 60 seconds.
Kieran Gilmurray
??♂?The Worlds 1st Chief Generative AI Officer ?? 2 * Author ??? Keynote Speaker ?? 10x Global Award Winner ?? 7x LinkedIn Top Voice ?? 50k+ LinkedIn Connections ?? KieranGilmurray.com & thettg.com
At last weeks Udacity + #UiPath's RPA Insiders Virtual Conference I was asked a question 'If an organization is using RPA, how can it scale?' I gave out a stat, then a health warning on the definition of scale and then a 60 second answer. This is all outlined below.
But what would you have said if you had 60 seconds or less?
- Statistic: Forrester claim scale remains RPAs Achilles' heel. More than half of all RPA programs worldwide employ fewer than 10 bots. Fragmented automation initiatives, a patchwork of vendors, incomplete governance models, and attempts to automate overly complex tasks stall programs. Organizations that attempt to grow their RPA program must overcome process, governance, and culture obstacles.
- Health warning: Scale assumes size but it can also mean benefit and the two are sometimes no linked. For example, over my time in RPA I have introduced 2 bots that delivered $3m of benefit over 2 years, 3 bots that delivered north of $5m of savings and another bot that delivered $1.1m of outsource cost savings. I strongly advice that folks don’t link licence count to scale; nor the size of their automation team and say big equals success; the only judge of any programs success is the business benefits derived from the program (big benefits can happily equal scale).
Advice: To scale, with ROI front and centre, there are a number of pre-requisites: lots of things needed here and that can surprise people starting out as RPA is often sold as very easy. Whilst RPA is not hard; it is also not easy to get right either
- Establish a Centre of Expertise to regulate, promote, govern, filter and validate business cases, PR, hire – train – coach – mentor and manage RPA colleagues, link with IT to ensure there is a suitable enterprise platform available (my preference is Cloud platform, for agility) and support.
- Executive sponsorship – digital and automation enabled transformation requires dedicated / proactive time and money.
- Has to be a top 5 agenda item and 100% align the RPA | automation program to the businesses broader transformation goals
- Build a robust business case – one a CFO will stand over and sign off.
- Bring an intelligent automation toolkit – RPA cant do it alone – do, think, see… but automation muscle takes time so plan for this and take your time.
- Ideally streamline, redesign, standardise processes and only then digitise and automate
- Treat RPA platforms as an enterprise platform – make available always.
- Build a pipeline or valuable processes
- Design for humans not machines i.e. great customer and staff experience
- Have an excellent governance model to assess, review and track process business benefits
- Develop an automation and digital mind-set – automation first mind-set -
What would you have said in 60 seconds in addition to, or instead of the above?
?#intelligentautomation #bots #rpaworks #digitaltransformation#roboticprocessautomation #rpa #cognitiveautomation #digitaldisruption#digitalworkforce #processautomation #digitalfuture #digitalstrategy
Other articles: If you like this article then you may find these articles of use too.
- How to build a business case for Intelligent Automation and Robotic Process Automation
- 30 ways to build a pipeline of processes suitable for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Automation (IA)
- The biggest lie told to RPA customers - 50 robots equals success
- 40 essential selection criteria to choose an RPA platform
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iMBA Student at University of Illinois | Product Manager | Product Owner | CSM? | CSPO? | SAFe? 5 POPM | AA Certified | UIPath Certified | Lean Six Sigma Green Belt | Harvard Business Review Advisor
4 年Very insightful and helpful .
Tired of Technical Jargons - RPA? Intelligent Automation? Gen AI? Agentic AI? Follow and be entertained| Top 50 PEX Global Operational Excellence Thought Leader 2023
4 年Very insightful. I have learnt scaling is relative to an organisation. Whilst there are different ways to scale, the end goal should align with organisation strategic goals. If company XYZ is focused on customer retention, scaling could be interpreted in terms of investing in technologies to improve customer journey. There is an upfront cost usually associated with scaling and customers have to tread carefully as benefits may not be realised as quick as anticipated. Some interesting reads. https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/tolani-jaiye-tikolo-42471696_rpa-pega-intellibot-activity-6713528185159524352-Swol https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/lasserindomautomationhero_rpa-activity-6713739861842558976-UpOE
AI & Automation Fanatic & Sceptic | Entrepreneur | Investor | Managing Partner | Board Member @ Money-Key AG
4 年I would have responded around these key aspects: 1. no scale without culture! Create the cultural environment for digitalization and automation: and this means, be ready for change! 2. No executive sponsorship no success: automation at scale can't be the hobby of some few, it needs to be a priority in the enterprise. 3. Only a running robot is a good robot, this means if you don't build & keep running robots, you will never generate the business value you have (or you have been) promised. 4. Don't buy everything the software vendors sell, automation isn't easy at all. Automation is very very hard work, "easy" for the robots, but for sure much harder for the people involved, and it starts way before any (low or no) coding at all! 5. "If you gonna do it, do it right". This means work with ... You know what, how to do it right is something we will discuss in one of our automation journey workshops ;-)
Global Head of Automation | Randstad Enterprise | UK
4 年Kieran Gilmurray ?? – thanks for sparking this discussion. Great piece of advice from seasoned automation professionals like you and the others in this thread. One key point I would like to add is that organizations must realize that automation is not the end goal rather a means to deliver superior business value to customers. Automation technologies like RPA, ML/AI are set of tools in a bigger “business transformation/process improvements” toolbox. The focus must be on scaling and accelerating organizational capability to solve critical business problems using a combination of automation tools and technologies along with business process re-engineering, and Lean Six Sigma. True scale can only be achieved and more importantly, sustained if everyone in the organization continuously acquires new skills and pursues relentless improvements to products, processes and systems to exceed customer requirements. Number of bots, value delivered through RPA/automations etc. are valid output measures of the scale but the key outcome businesses must strive to achieve is to build the organizational capability to solve business problems at scale and speed, and deliver better value to their customers faster than their competition in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive markets.
Kieran Gilmurray ?? that was a great read. You mentioned the link with IT for a suitable platform and support. I know this to be true because I find there are instances where ways of working and relationships with IT could be improved to drive scale. Particularly in larger organisations, strong alignment with IT has the potential to impact delivery timelines significantly – infra access, target app integration, app access, test data, and more. Besides, as robots enter production and organisations start to scale, the importance of IT only grows with the increasing interconnectedness of an organisations digital workforce and their changing IT estate... ??????