For most enterprises, it has been common-ground over the last few decades to focus on lowering costs and increasing workforce efficiency, whether it was through technological innovation or the offshoring of labor. While they generated unprecedented value over time, the benefits of these models have now stagnated due to shifts in political climates, workforce costs, and cultures. Luckily, today’s digital age has given way to new technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which promises to deliver the benefits of the old once again, but this time with robots doing repetitive work.

Below are some points which may help your enterprise build a roadmap for implementing RPA

1. Creating a Centre of Excellence – Heart of RPA Implementation

Establish a CoE team for RPA Implementation with defined roles and responsibilities, appoint managers, solution architects, developers, infrastructure and service support to take on key roles in the RPA CoE. The team needs to understand how to work well together, they should adhere to standard processes and procedures, and measure business metrics and performance goals, including RoI and customer satisfaction.

The RPA CoE team is essentially a steering committee that provides overall direction and governance. Team members should meet regularly and include key representatives from the business, IT, Audit, Finance, and others who will ensure the outcomes of RPA initiatives are in line with the expectations of executive management. The CoE Council should focus on driving RPA adoption across business units to create economies of scale and into the design and performance of the organization.

2. Process assessment and prioritization

A key initial step is to understand the scope of potential and priorities for process automation in your business, prior to embarking on your RPA journey, your CoE team should be aware of what they want to achieve and prioritize it, setting a well-structured vision ensures the selected processes generate both a financial benefit, and a strategic advantage for the business. RPA Assessment Program should allow you to evaluate and make a considered decision. Like the percentage of transactional/rule-based processes, dependencies that automation could disrupt, potential cost advantage in terms of RoI.

3. Strategic planning

As no business wants to miss the RPA flight, they need to strategize well before the adoption. Identifying the processes that need to be automated as well as setting the expectations right for short-term and long-term ROI is very important before making the implementation decisions.

The first phase of Strategic planning should focus on implementing a few robots across business functions, automating high impact, simple and repetitive tasks. The focus should be on continuous improvement and validating outcomes against the set benefits. The bot should help maximize productivity, and ROI.

4. Flawless Implementation

RPA implementation is one of the most interesting, special programs where the demand for support from leadership and the working team both are required which in return ensures flawless implementation, this helps to build confidence around the implementation of the RPA, and also to include the entire company in developing a system that works with the RPA.

Implementing RPA can be difficult because it requires – or should require – approval starting at the top. It should run through all of your enterprise major departments, ranging from investor groups to operation floor leads to finance to management. Departments that will be affected by the RPA should all be consulted as well, and all departments should be considered in the RPA implementation process.

5. Adoption and Change Management

Adopting Robotic Process Automation sounds straightforward, but it can be sometimes complicated and a challenging exercise,when thinking of RPA implementations, we conventionally focus our attention on devising the best strategic and tactical plans for automation, when RPA is embedded into your normal day-to-day operations, soon digital labor becomes part of organizational planning, this is a clear indication of an enterprise adopting RPA implementations.