Scaling successfully – what would you have said? You have 60 seconds.

At last weeks Udacity + #UiPath‘s RPA Insiders Virtual Conference I was asked a question ‘If an organization is using RPA, how can it scale?’ I gave out a stat, then a health warning on the definition of scale and then a 60 second answer. This is all outlined below.

But what would you have said if you had 60 seconds or less?

Statistic: Forrester claim scale remains RPAs Achilles’ heel. More than half of all RPA programs worldwide employ fewer than 10 bots. Fragmented automation initiatives, a patchwork of vendors, incomplete governance models, and attempts to automate overly complex tasks stall programs. Organizations that attempt to grow their RPA program must overcome process, governance, and culture obstacles.
Health warning: Scale assumes size but it can also mean benefit and the two are sometimes no linked. For example, over my time in RPA I have introduced 2 bots that delivered $3m of benefit over 2 years, 3 bots that delivered north of $5m of savings and another bot that delivered $1.1m of outsource cost savings. I strongly advice that folks don’t link licence count to scale; nor the size of their automation team and say big equals success; the only judge of any programs success is the business benefits derived from the program (big benefits can happily equal scale).

Advice: To scale, with ROI front and centre, there are a number of pre-requisites: lots of things needed here and that can surprise people starting out as RPA is often sold as very easy. Whilst RPA is not hard; it is also not easy to get right either

Establish a Centre of Expertise to regulate, promote, govern, filter and validate business cases, PR, hire – train – coach – mentor and manage RPA colleagues, link with IT to ensure there is a suitable enterprise platform available (my preference is Cloud platform, for agility) and support.
Executive sponsorship – digital and automation enabled transformation requires dedicated / proactive time and money.
Has to be a top 5 agenda item and 100% align the RPA | automation program to the businesses broader transformation goals
Build a robust business case – one a CFO will stand over and sign off.
Bring an intelligent automation toolkit – RPA cant do it alone – do, think, see… but automation muscle takes time so plan for this and take your time.
Ideally streamline, redesign, standardise processes and only then digitise and automate
Treat RPA platforms as an enterprise platform – make available always.
Build a pipeline or valuable processes
Design for humans not machines i.e. great customer and staff experience
Have an excellent governance model to assess, review and track process business benefits
Develop an automation and digital mind-set – automation first mind-set –

What would you have said in 60 seconds in addition to, or instead of the above?

#intelligentautomation #bots #rpaworks #digitaltransformation #roboticprocessautomation #rpa #cognitiveautomation #digitaldisruption #digitalworkforce #processautomation #digitalfuture #digitalstrategy

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