Strategizing Robotics Process Automation · 2018-04-03 · assessing factors like: ... repeat the key opportunities before actual implementation of the robotics process automation
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Time is the greatest money making asset any individual
can possess - Ed Slott.
With ever increasing competition, reduced profit margins and
advanced disruptive innovation, one of the biggest challenges faced
by any business is increase productivity & improve customer services
so as to attract new customer and retain existing ones. One of the
core reasons of emergence of automation industry wide is to ensure
that business can continue its operations seamlessly without any
impacts caused by human inefficiency. However, even with
increased automation, the productivity and operational efficiency
are hit because of human-centric problems around:
Communication gap
Understanding the bigger picture
Poor management and supervision
Inconsistency in work
Inadequate technical knowledge
As a result of these, there is often more time consumed by
employees doing manual jobs viz. reworking on similar horizontal
and vertical processes, collating & processing information,
investigating, validation, comparing reports, summarizing reports
and so on. In such circumstances, very little time is devoted to those
crucial tasks which have a positive impact on customer experience –
tasks which make it extremely easy for the customer to learn about
you, buy from you, and get support from you as and when they need
it.
Due to economic competition, many companies across various
industry verticals are looking forward to mechanism to make their
employees apply latest skills and intelligence in their work. Swaying
away the burden of manual tasks and engaging employees in best
possible ways to create maximum value out of their actual business
is crucial for an organization’s survival. When all business tasks are
well organized, it helps an organization produce more useful product
and services for the end users.
Bots for automation
The sole idea of automation was not to replace full time employee
with bots but to give employees enough time to add value to the
product or service, so that customers choose their organization over
the competitors.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an automation software or a
piece of code which can perform human actions based on defined
rules.
RPA is not meant to make judgmental decisions, or to predict
intelligence in the task or take any kind of supervised/unsupervised
learning decisions. Such tasks belongs to the Cognitive Task Analysis
which emphasizes on tasks requiring cognitive activities such as
reasoning, remembering, decision making, problem solving, making
judgment, etc.
Typically, a bot is meant to replace human’s repetitive, mundane and
tiresome tasks where there is big impact on the operational
effectiveness and business revenue. With the right mix of bot viz.
rule based bots, logger bots and analytical bots in a process flow plus
using RPA framework, brings various advantages as represented in
the diagram below:
Recognizing the potential of Automation
An organization must formerly understand the right mix of various
types of bots and then evaluate to map their ability to provide the
right result at the right time:
Rule Based Bots: Understand the inputs that a user/system
provides and are limited to giving results based on user-
defined rules. These software bots do not understand the
intent and context of the user. For example optimizers,
logger bots, etc.
Analytical Bots: The super bots or an intelligent personal
software assistant understand the intent and context of the
user/system and serve the end user based on the previous
actions/supervised learning mechanism. They belong to the
cognitive task analysis mentioned above.
Organization of all sizes, are working towards recognizing the
potential in automation to become more customer-centric, imbibe
innovation as core strategy and improve quality of their end product
and services.
Leveraging the human capital
One of the challenge when initiating robotic process automation
implementation is to handle employees’ fear of job-loss and gain
their cooperation during strategy and implementation phases. It is
crucial for an organization to determine these impacts and mitigate
any risks associated with productivity and behavioural issues by
letting their automation team involved in change management
assessing factors like:
To map employees’ existing skillset
Skills set requirements post RPA implementation
Setting up career path for their employees
Identification of new roles / jobs for next generation
processes
Besides automation, digitally enabled human capital is very critical
to enhance productivity and quality of the product and services. The
industry needs more strategic and innovative thinkers to compete in
the global markets. The employees are expected to go beyond their
usual roles and undertake thought leadership roles in respective
departments.
On the basis of human centric problems, the employees should be
granted reasonable time off for enhancing demanding skills which
enables them do corporate functions more effectively and
efficiently. Such an arrangement is only possible when companies
start looking shifting their focus from mundane everyday tasks;
which can otherwise be efficiently executed using robotic process
automation. With the right fusion of digital workforce and efficient
execution by bots, the companies can harness the opportunities in
the global markets. An ever increasing adoption of new technologies
such as analytics, big data platforms, cloud computing, internet of
things, etc., the companies are realizing the value of skilled
workforce and new job roles viz. data scientists, data engineers, big
data analysts, marketing technologists, IoT architects, visualization
analysts, strategic thinkers, etc. The employees with right skills can
help an organization milk the several revenue generation
opportunities that they might miss otherwise.
Sustaining Global Transformation
The advancement in Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine
communication (M2M) and communication technologies is expected
to generate zettabytes in next 5 years. The volume of data generated
in last two years is 90% is the total data of the world. The massive
data generated from billions of connected devices can no longer be
managed by traditional data management systems or by human
intervention. Amid digital transformation, organizations must adopt
new technologies, build vibrant value fabric with right partnerships
and digital workforce to deliver value to customers. The new big data
management platforms, query processing tools, storage
management and automation tools are the key to manage ongoing
business operations.
In manufacturing, the usage of IoT technology is helping companies
optimize the expenses related to energy, supply chain management
and inventory control. The granular visibility into energy
consumption, equipment tracking and monitoring tools enhance
efficiency, helps in predictive maintenance and provides actionable
insights of resource utilization. Similarly in healthcare sector, the
alert mechanisms, patient entry- exit workflows, remote monitoring,
etc. significantly improve the efficiency of the entire hospital.
The top performing IT, manufacturing and healthcare and all other
industries have ensured to automate all possible processes which in
turn impacts the overall organizational efficiency. The quick
turnaround times in fault resolutions, minimization of
product/services defects and elimination of delayed outputs give
astounding results in increasing overall efficiency and thus increased
customer satisfaction. The robotics process automation helps in
gaining people support where they can actually add value in the
value fabric of transforming environment.
Identifying Potential RPA Opportunity
When thinking about the opportunities that RPA brings to an
organization, it is quite cumbersome to estimate which
areas/departments/processes to be targeted. There are always set
of processes in an organization that require manual intervention
between applications. Generally, the teams / departments with high
volume of processes are sought for such an initiative. However many
seem to ignore other critical factors identifying which this emerging
technology is likely to bring maximum returns. The synergy of the
following critical factors brings more rewards that usual selection.
Changing Operating Models
Organization Structural changes: Given that RPA is successfully
implemented in an organization, are we assuring that efficiency and
productivity will also improve? It is of utmost importance to
understand how RPA implementation affects the nature of tasks,
individual and group interactions and how will the organization of
the future look like?
Robotics process automation affects the organization structure as a
whole. The organizational changes defines the new org. structure,
reporting relationships, role and task redesigning to align themselves
to the robotics processes. There would be changes in the nature of
work groups and workflow management. The new organizational
structure would require identifying roles like:
o RPA Process owners
o Decision makers – responsible for business rules
definitions, change management and refinement
o Robotics Process monitors and analysts – responsible
for supporting, monitoring and benchmarking
(quality) of the RPA processes
o Developers and testers – responsible for development,
configuration and testing of robotics processes before
implementation.
As mentioned in the previous section, the organizations have to
redeploy their employees where they will be given a chance to reskill
and transform themselves into a digital workforce.
Functional Interface Changes
An organization’s structural changes plus process changes needs a
possible mechanism to control various functions in an organization.
Introducing a collection of RACI matrixes for the automated
processes fully segregates the duties/tasks associated with each
robotics process. It avoids any conflicts of interests between
individuals/roles so that the new robotic implementation works
seamlessly. An overview of a RACI matrix helps designing the
robotics process governance and allocation of new roles which have
otherwise unclear accountability and responsibility associated with
each business function.
Key Result Area / Performance Management
The key performance indicators of the robotics processes measure
the effectiveness of the newly implemented processes and help
robotics team measure performance of the business processes. KPI
measurement is essential for tracking, analysing, prioritizing and
improving the overall output of the processes. Robotic process when
improves, also helps enterprise KPIs improve. The following KPIs are
directly related to the robotics processes:
o Percentage : Availability of RPA Process vs FTE
o Number : Count of processes automated / Total
Process Count
o Percentage : Errors RPA Processes / Total RPA Process
o Percentage : Uptime / Total Time
o Percentage : Count of RPA processes / Count of FTE
o Return on Investment (ROI)
o Turnaround Time : Total Time between submission
and output
o Number of cases closed per hour/week/month
o Queue/Backlog Size
o Profit per bot
Organizational Change Management
Organizations must address people specific change management
aspects when dealing with changing environment because of factors
– org. structural, functional and KPIs as mentioned in sections above.
To address the uncertainties employees might have due to RPA
implementation, it is very crucial to manage the organization
transition in terms of:
o Leadership alignment – This is to align the RPA
strategy, tactics and organizational goals. The
alignment ensures that the strategic decisions are
effectively implemented throughout the
organization. The employees are more likely to adapt
to the organizational robotics process automation
adoption when they see their respective leaders
support the new strategic initiative. It is alignment of
the leaders at various levels of an organization that
assists in successful implementation of robotics
process automation.
o Communication – is another key aspect to ensure
that RPA implementation is accepted at all levels of
organizational hierarchy. As per a research, the
employees of an organization prefer hearing
organizational change from:
Sponsor of the change
Immediate manager
An effective communication about adoption of RPA implementation
must address the following questions:
Why RPA is getting implemented?
What is the risk of not adopting RPA?
What is there for the employees?
It is also equally important that there should be two way
communication. An organization must give their employees the
opportunity to share their concerns, ask queries and participate in
feedback surveys. To gain employees’ support, an organization must
repeat the key opportunities before actual implementation of the
robotics process automation projects.
Strategy Roadmap
In times of radical business changes, the companies needs to also
consider new long term strategy on investment and optimization of
new and existing resource pool to pursue innovation and capture
market intelligence for survival. The digital transformation ambition
dream needs sufficient capital for this purpose which is achievable
by reducing the existing OpEx and CapEx costs.
The organizations need to focus on implementing new strategy
models which focus primarily on the following aspects of robotic
process automation:
Identification of organization functions where robotics
process automation (RPA) can be implemented. This consists
of identification of business application, corporate functions
and legacy systems and assessment on ROI (return on
investment – tools, consulting, partnership, etc.) for
implementation of automation strategy.
Defining execution roadmap and implementation strategy
and mapping it to that of organization vision and mission.
This consists of defining end to end robotic automation plan,
tools support, resource management, risk mitigation
planning, scope (control on automation), and governance
model plus expansion possibility to next level of automation
– Cognitive Automation.
Strategy and operating model review. As said, your strategy
needs a strategy. Regular reviews are very important to
sustain in disruptive environment. In such ever changing
business environment, this aspect must be covered to define
the automation review strategy, setting up review periods
and thus fine tuning the described strategies based on
intermittent business situations
The cost saved from implementation of robotics process automation
caters to the investment opportunities in new verticals of the
business. Not merely in internal organizational changes, but
automation also helps in speeding the Mergers & Acquisition
activities and thus have significant impact on integration of business
processes and technology.
Mitigating Bots Trust Issues
Opinions usually varies on whether robotics process automation
bots can be trusted. There are often questions raised about the
readiness of RPA technology. To mitigate such risks, the
organizations must also engage in building fall back policy and strong
governance to manage the new next generation robotic processes.
Having real time refreshed view of bots activities, dashboards with
visualization of bots status supported by well engineering analytics
are quite helpful.
A good RPA implementation should provide preconfigured security
settings for the underlying applications. In order to create secure
RPA environment, the solution should manage flawless
authentication to the backend applications. There are various
credentials vaults available which can securely store passwords
against URLs/Applications and retrieves the password during RPA
process handshaking. All credentials and keys in credential vault are
encrypted to protect against disclosure to a hacker.
RPA Critical Success Factors
Choosing the right Product: based on business needs and
supporting (compatible) with your existing technologies and
upcoming technologies.
Accurate configuration: An efficient configuration can save
business resources, cuts downtime and thus reduces any
debugging efforts. In right automated environment, the bots
have access to the relevant applications, proper logging
mechanism and correct workflow configuration.
Process mining techniques: Process Mining plays an
important role to understand the “As-Is” processes and the
RPA opportunities. An effective technique provides the key
insights of the business processes by creating an interactive
process map using the process logs. It helps detect
inefficiencies due to hidden vulnerabilities, time-taking steps,
process bottlenecks and unnecessary detours.
Choosing the right consulting partner: Helps an organization
assess their needs and match their requirements that suits its
purposes. The right consulting partner helps an organization
in
o Define the new operating model
o Setting up RPA Centre of Excellence (Governance)
o Define and Build Automation Roadmap and execution
methodology
o Identify and Build business cases
o Evaluate RPA products
o Determine business prioritization, ROI and effort
estimation
o Identify areas of improvement or enhanced
automation
o Recommend RPA best practices
Conclusion
As mentioned above, with constantly changing business
environment and increasing global competition, the organizations
look forward to their employees to constantly innovate and be part
of marketing strategy. The need of the time is to connect to end
users in real time and also recognize and addressing instantly the
customer pain points. Any gap in process flow directly impacts the
overall cycle time, time to market and right first time measurement
indicators. The gap is fulfilled by adoption of robotics process
automation which helps organization focus on proactive marketing,
focus more on marketing strategy and achieving high customer
satisfaction results. Industry does not want to invest in projects of 3-
5 years and wait for the results to come after years. They want to see
the immediate ROI of their investments.
The resource optimization and cost reduction using robotics process
automation helps organization extend their services and improve
the value they deliver to their end customers.
Acknowledgement
The development of this research paper benefited significantly from
the inputs and support by our outstanding group of thought leaders.
Shreekala Jaydeep – Group Practice Head
Leonard Leo D'Silva – Business Consultant
ABOUT TECH MAHINDRA
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