The numbers don’t lie: companies all over the world have come to grips with the idea that leveraging software robots to enhance workflow efficiency and productivity has become a best practice for maximum gain for businesses across the industry spectrum.
An HfS survey of Global 2000 revealed that more than 80% of the companies have embarked on the automation journey. However, of those, 34% are still in the pilot phase, 27% are moving to production, while merely 13% have managed to pursue scaling RPA and to move on to enterprise-wide deployment.
“An HfS survey of Global 2000 revealed that more than 80% of the companies have embarked on the automation journey. ”
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Why do so many companies stop after automating the ‘low hanging fruit’ processes instead of continuing to move forward along the automation path?
Why is the percentage of companies that scale up so small, when so many studies show that it is what really unlocks the full potential of software robots?
Lack of knowledge is supposedly the main reason: lack of knowledge about what to expect, about efficient practices for advancing automation, about the resources that must be invested, or about how to avoid the pitfalls that might stand in the way.
If it’s about a lack of knowledge, it’s worth starting the discussion with a functional definition of RPA scalability. It includes the following three aspects:
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handling increased workload by involving more bots in task performance, aggregating bots’ capacities, and enhancing their versatility for optimal goal attainment;
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expanding the range of automated processes, and generalizing the automation of similar processes across various departments;
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increasing the broadness of access by fostering access to new technologies.
Tips for successfully scaling RPA
Before we discuss the bot categories that underpin scaling, we will first mention three helpful hints proposed by UiPath. We do this because we’ve seen plenty of case studies that speak for the effectiveness of the UiPath policy for scaling RPA.
1. Fully automating departments
Completing the automation of the ‘low hanging fruit’ processes leads to a time reduction between 7% and 15% per single department, which is much less than what you can expect from RPA implementation.
For this reason, it is mandatory to fully automate one or two departments. This is, in fact, the essence of the ‘total automation’ approach, based on per-department, and not a per-process business case, and characterised by longer ROI timelines.
2. Tackling inter-departmental processes
These processes are typically more complex, and, besides collaboration between different departments, they also require correspondingly complex technologies. For such reasons, successful automation of inter-departmental processes calls for educational interventions to support employees’ upskilling, and for the creation of an RPA Centre of Excellence with the required degree of oversight of the collaborative conduct.
Additionally, by centralising governance and decision making, the CoE fosters the enterprise-wide buy-in that you need. Lucrative automation of these inter-departmental processes can be viewed as a touchstone along the path towards organisation-wide use of software robots.
3. Investing in RPA-related continuous education for your employees
As we’ve talked before, addressing your employees’ resistance to RPA caused by the mythical fear of “robots will steal our jobs”, is among the top practices for successful RPA implementation.
Employees’ anxiety related to the development of disruptive technologies, with high potential to reduce the need for the human workforce, is certainly understandable to some extent. Training is the best way to alleviate these fears. An internal educational program meant to train your employees to become RPA developers and analysts can really make a difference: people are more likely to endorse the things that they understand and find predictable.
You might want to consider the free online RPA training and certifications offered by UiPath, or our recent guide for learning robotic process automation. The upskilled employees will not only be more enthusiastic and willing to support the automation journey, but they will also assure the right level of expertise for scaling RPA.
Types of software robots that support scaling RPA
1. Bots for automating the “low hanging fruits.”
These are the basic, most common kinds of bots, meant to address the need to perform more reliably and efficiently high-volume, routine, tedious, rule-based tasks. Apart from promoting a generic productivity raise in your business, their role is to prevent overburdening your employees.
When they must handle tasks like moving data from one spreadsheet to another, for instance, the chances of coming up with creative, ‘outside the box’ ideas, precisely the ideas that help your company progress, are drastically reduced.
Using software robots to allow the employees to focus on higher-value tasks that leverage human-specific traits like the propensity for human-to-human communication, will increase both customer and employee satisfaction, as well as business process efficiency or data quality.
An example of this type of bot can be seen in the following RPA demo, where an insurance professional is using an attended bot for data entry & extraction.
2. Bots for automating processes that add value to the organisation
Once the robotic work has been automated, scaling up across the company is the way to go. Your (well trained) employees now have more freedom to explore how they can further improve the company workflow and, ultimately, improve customer experience.
Enhanced reporting or improved task tracking are examples of means to this end. Just consider how reconciliation reports run by software robots can assist in streamlining the process by informing about various possibilities for holding work up, or by identifying in no time previous errors and omissions.
Deploying such bots is, in a sense, similar to a game theory approach, which assumes unlimited resources. In such conditions, it becomes more likely that employees will start to wonder how they can contribute to attaining the organisation’s objectives most efficiently, and act upon it.
3. Bots that support business decision making
Broad data sets are very useful for identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the workflow, and thus for making decisions that fix those pitfalls. Bots from this third category are able to integrate information from remote parts, in various formats, and thereby provide the staff with the necessary information for data-driven decisions.
Software robots’ capacity for data assembly, gathering, and formatting can assist the employees by expanding the data points to be considered. This encourages not only more exhaustive data usage but also novel, creative ways of using the data. The expected outcome is more fine-grained and reliable decisions.
4. Robot as a Service (RaaS)
This is a modern, cloud-based service approach, different from the original, on-premise solutions. It saves users the need to consider things like servers, licenses, networks, etc. Scalability, together with resilience, and variance of usage, are its main strengths, which make it perfectly suited for companies that aim to extend business capability without increasing headcount, or for companies with a highly fluctuating workload.
Our fleet of RPA Robots for Hire is the perfect illustration of this enhanced RPA solution. If you are falling behind on time-sensitive or SLA related operations, or have an unexpected spike in data entry/data conversion, then this might be exactly what you need.
Conclusion
If you want to find out more about scaling RPA, you can read our article on 6 ways to scale enterprise RPA. The “take-home message” is that robotic process automation promises to bring about those gains that are music to your ears, e.g., reduced operating costs and increased throughput, higher quality, improved customer service, when deployed at scale.
Indeed, automation is enticing – once you start with it, it’s best if you keep moving forward in the direction of an enterprise-wide use of software robots for maximum gain.
Finally, keep in mind that intelligent automation platform capabilities which can also be applied to more complex processes then the basic, rule-based ones (the first category of bots listed above), facilitate scaling up your RPA deployment.