Analytics and picking the right processes for RPA

Key goals of Robotic Process Automation:

• Cost reduction
• Labor force optimization (switch from routine to analytical tasks)
• Business process optimization
• Improvement in service delivery.

In order to achieve these goals with minimal input the well thought robotization strategy is required. It will help not only to reduce implementation costs but also scale up the effect gained from technology in future.

That's why it is important to select the right processes. The following steps should be followed (Image 1).

Image 1. RPA process selection steps

There are five key principles of processes. Let's take a look at them through the RPA technology prism:

1. Principle of process connection within the company – this principle helps to understand the process scale within the company and possible effect of further robotization

2. Principle of process demand – it is important to understand if the process topical and valuable for the company prior to starting work

3. Principle of process documentation – during the process robotization the business analysts should possess the business process documentation in order to reduce the costs of process reengineering. It will be enriched during the interviews and redone for the robotization purpose.

4. Principle of process control – one of the main goals during the process analysis is to understand the exact scope of incoming and outgoing data. It is necessary to clearly see the final result.

5. Principle of responsibility for the process – during the project approval phase – when there are more than one departments within the company are affected – it is important to have the contact person as the business process owner. This person will be responsible for conflict resolution.

What should be paid attention to during the selection:

· Rule based processes
· Stable processes
· Process with a lot of data to process
· Processes launched by events, schedule or data.

What should be excluded during the selection:

· Processes with high uncertainty level (there is no strict logic)
· Processes that require processing of hand-written documents
· Process with strong CAPTCHA
· Process that require decision making based on experience/intuition of user.

Process or operations within one process could be divided into 4 groups based on two properties (Image 2):

· Frequency of process execution (or operations within the process) – the higher the frequency of the process execution, the higher potential for robotization it has.
· Difficulty of process execution (or operations within the process) – the more difficult the process execution, the more resources will be required to robotize it.

Image 2. Four groups of processes or operations within them

In order to optimize the process of initial process selection the standard questionnaire should be developed taking into account the company specifics. The points within the questionnaire advisable to separate into blocks:

· common properties – the name of the process and its description
· numerical properties – quantitative process properties and full time equivalent of employee performing the task
· data properties – both for incoming, outgoing and data being used
· system properties – the systems with which the interaction happens, availability of the test environment
· process properties– how well the process is standardized, number of exclusions, possibility of action algorithmization
· business properties – potential profits of process robotization
· organizational properties – who will be responsible for the robotized process, the necessity of staff training.

Based on experience of our company, after running the initial interviewing on average only there only 9 out of 50 processes are sufficient for RPA (Image 3). Other process could be automated using the robotic process automation as well but those cases should be calculated separately in a deeper way.

Image 3. Sufficient and insufficient process for RPA

Those numbers are considered normal for process selection within the company because employees could recommend wrong processes for RPA both from lack of topic competence and on purpose.

The employees within the company could negatively react to the intention of company to automate their work with program robots. That's why it is important to convey them the information of all RPA pros and cons. The goal of RPA implementation is not to cut staff but to free them from routine manual tasks so they can perform more interesting and intellectual work. Besides that, when starting the RPA journey, it is reasonable to train already existing internal employees how to perform the robotization. NFP provides services on creating and developing internal Centers of RPA Exellence which helps with solving this task.

In addition to analysis, NFP runs the ROI (Return On Investment) calculation of potential RPA projects to defend them before the stakeholders (Image 4). ROI is the key factor of successful RPA implementation.

Image 4. Graph on costs and benefits

The essence of the methodology is to choose a standard project for the company that is optimal in terms of return on investment.

On the RPA page you will find all the necessary information about this technology and will be able to contact our experts.

Vadim Petrov

RPA Consultant