Demand for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has reached record high, thanks to fast-tracked digitization and the need for organizations to control costs while freeing human resources for higher-value initiatives.

In 2022, it is hard to find an organization that hasn’t started its transformation and automation journey. Many businesses fail at the initial stage due to lack of clarity, direction, and non-alignment of technology initiatives to business objectives.

Business leaders are struggling to modernize legacy applications owing to the complexity and cost of ownership. Consequently, as business users’ demands evolve, organizations turn to manual processes and workarounds — leading to increased costs and processing errors.

Also Read: Robotic Process Automation Use-cases across Organizational Functions

So, here are a few best practices that can take your organization beyond ‘Proof of Concept’ to company-wide automation.

1. Identify Processes: Identify and understand processes with the stakeholders and process owners that currently run the process. Make a list or record the activities under each process and create a runbook out of it. This runbook can then be analysed during automation to understand bottlenecks, remove redundancies, and identify time-consuming and error-prone activities. This will help the automation leaders to create an automation journey based on real-life scenarios.

2. Build a center of excellence (CoE): Organization must overcome the internal resistance to new technology adoption by creating a robust centre of excellence in place. It must have clear objectives, and a change management plan that helps them to create and spread awareness about RPA and facilitate employee adoption.

The CoE team can include experts from cross-functional processes playing a key role in technology adoption such as automation leaders and promoters, RPA champions, change managers, skill development team, service support, analysts, etc.

3. Don’t start a pilot program without the right talent:  During your automation journey, rushing into a pilot without the right talent can reduce your chances of success. Inexperienced teams may fail to align the initiative with business objectives and deliver quick results.

Successful pilot programs are backed by cross-functional teams that can ensure RPA solutions are built, aligned, deployed, and improved from time to time. A report by Deloitte states that more than 60% of businesses rely on RPA partners, realizing the need for skills they don’t possess to drive their automation initiatives.

4. Provide training and guidance: It is important to offer structured guidance to all the stakeholders involved to ensure successful business outcomes. Providing appropriate training to all business users helps to create a pool of pro-technology and skilled resources in the organization. Create a structured roadmap to ensure that everyone is trained, right from the seniors, managers, right down to the junior employees. Give them a sense of the overall business objectives and how RPA can help them to achieve it. Once a select batch is trained, ensure that they are ready to eventually train resources under them.

5. Choose the right technology partner: Carrying out automation with internal resources can be a big challenge. Also, identifying the right path forward with other tasks at hand will be cumbersome. It is better to shift the responsibility to a partner with RPA expertise which can guide the leaders in the right direction and deliver desired results.

Clover Infotech has been pioneering in RPA across industries such as banking, insurance, financial services, manufacturing, etc. for more than 25 years. They have been successful in reducing manual workloads at few of the leading private banks and insurance providers in India and the middle east. They have rich expertise in automating redundant and repetitive processes to enable organizations to free their resources and focus on other imperatives.

Partnering with Clover Infotech will ensure that your organization embraces new technologies and starts its automation journey, thereby increasing functional efficiency and maximizing its ROI.