RPA and its Potential Pitfalls

I’m a little more famous this month after some good press coverage on my RPA journey to date. I’ve appeared in the New Scientist, as well as an RPA case study completed by the LSE (London School of Economics). I’ve tried not to let the press coverage go to my head, but I have asked SSON for a chauffeur service to pick me up and a private jet to take me to the SSON conference in Amsterdam in a few weeks’ time – for those that haven’t had an opportunity to hear me speak live (you’re not missing much) but it’d be nice not to see a room full of empty chairs! RPA is buzzing round the outsourcing world at the moment. If it’s not Buyers of BPO looking at alternatives, it’s sellers wanting to utilise various RPA platforms to reduce their costs and come in under the competition in RFP’s that they are competing in. It’s not really surprising either, is it? An easy-to-implement way to lower your costs, maintain or increase accuracy, decrease turnaround time, increase your MI and potentially bring back control of your processes in house. But is it really all it’s cracked up to be? And what are the potential pit falls to avoid if you’re investigating an RPA deployment in your business? I thought I’d highlight a couple of the areas that I’ve had to overcome in order to grow my RPA deployment. I’ve already covered the biggest challenge in my 3rd blog (Winning Round the Doubters), but once RPA is deployed there are some best practices to share, which should ensure your operation delivers the maximum benefits. 1. Grow your infrastructure in conjunction with adding in volume. Sounds like a bit of a no brainer, but I’ve been stung a few times with this, now. My RPA developers are so efficient that I’ve twice ran out of Virtual Machines to run the developed processes on, and it’s a really long-winded internal process to then grow the virtual Infrastructure again, which hinders future progress. 2. Ensure you have a solid process for infrastructure patching and also updating your RPA software to the latest version. Again, this is common sense, but left unchecked you may well find yourself in a similar situation to one I’m in the midst of fixing. Your infrastructure will quickly start to creak and fail unless you keep up to date with patching and best practice, and as RPA continues to evolve, the most up to date (well tested) version is something you should attempt to move to as early as you can. 3. RPA doesn’t have any common sense, your processes therefore need to. A significant error led me to realise this one. You don’t want your Board to first hear about RPA in a negative light so ensure that your automated processes also include common sense check points – those moments when a person would think, "I’ve already actioned this" or "this order doesn’t look right." Every process will obviously have a different common sense need, but make sure you remember that RPA won’t know this, unless you build it into your process. 4. Not all RPA solutions are actual RPA. Perhaps it’s because I’m a pioneer with the RPA Blueprism software specifically, but RPA for me isn’t a manually supported pre-programmed screen scrape technology. It’s an Enterprise-level supported platform that has an expected up time SLA, due to its importance to the business. There are plenty of new players in the RPA market now, but make sure you do your research on exactly what the solution is and how much "daily upkeep" it needs in order to run. I think that’s enough secrets let out the bag for this week, I’ll start to convey my thoughts around additional uses for RPA in your business next time. Feel free to say "Hi" at the SSON event in Amsterdam if you are about. [inlinead]

RPA and its Potential Pitfalls

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