Leading enterprises worldwide are moving their value chains towards an automated system. However, the progress of all automation initiatives is not seeing the same level of success.

5 key questions to ensure your automation program is successful

There are five reasons to consider when trying to achieve automation success. Business leaders need to reflect and understand the purpose or the problem statement.

1. Measure for automation opportunities (What?)

Start with asking "what" in assessing your practice landscape to distinguish opportunity areas. The suitable candidate processes will have an extensive amount of time for manual interaction with a computer interface, and be largely rules-based, or performed at frequent intervals

• Which processes are the right ones for automation?

• Which activities would be suitable to pilot?

• How should functional leaders participate in automation transformation?

• What are the influences of continuing with the pilot?

2. Develop your business case (Why?)

After deciding the focus area of automation, we need to understand how automation can restructure the tasks and deliver business goals. Thus, a pilot test enables you to experiment with the idea and understand resource requirements that ensure the investment delivers the benefits. Moreover, the pilot test process also improves the understanding of various limitations of your transformation project and get support from stakeholders.

• Why does RPA help to achieve your business goals?

• What is the expected growth of your core value?

• What is the problem to be solved?

• What is the key metric to identify whether RPA is worthwhile?

• What is the appropriate method to deploy existing stakeholders after automation?

3. Determine the optimal operation model (How?)

Based on the transformative vision, you need to create a tactical automation experience within the enterprise or replace it with the minimum efforts. The automation plan must specify the different operating structures and determine sourcing decisions.

• If automation is being managed by internal IT teams, consider who will be responsible for measuring, planning, and focusing on the new automation processes. Also, who will develop and test the automated job?

• Which adaptive transformation model is most efficient for your business?

• Does your organization have the right specialists to deliver the outcome and take responsibility for automation?

• Who will take charge to manage and decide on the software robot?

4. Identify your automation partner(s) (Who?)

In this stage, you should be evaluating your automation partners. Ensuring your current and future needs can be met through the prospective solutions. Vendor demonstrations are valuable to benchmark and validate on-the-ground experiences and realize complications and difficulty early on. Choose which price models align with your business values and objectives and which vendors offer similar pricing structures.

• Who are the prominent vendors in the RPA environment?

• Who are the vendors potentially helping to achieve your organization's needs?

• How should you benchmark the prices comparison framework to understand what the organization is investing in?

5. Plan the automation roadmap (When?)

Before initiating the automation journey verified stakeholders must clearly understand automation's what, why, and how.

• How long should the duration of your test be?

• What are the systematic phases right after the pilot test?

• What is your tactics for measurement?

• How will you affect stakeholders to recognize automation's what, why, and how?

Automation is creating enormous opportunities for enterprises

Automation allows businesses to evolve from current challenges and achieve the most efficient operations and effective customer service. The typical benefit of RPA is that robots can perform routine processes using repetitive features, data prediction, and follow simple rules to make decisions. Moreover, robot-based process performance is designed to deliver financial benefits besides consistent and fewer operational errors than human processes.

• Business leaders leverage RPA to achieve operational efficiencies more than cost reduction. Some of these benefits are:

• Decreased cycle times and improved throughput: automatons are intended to accomplish tasks quicker than human activity.

• Flexibility and scalability: when the foundation instructions allow scheduling of tasks that can be rapidly reassigned, each robot can perform many types of procedures simultaneously.

• Improved precision: robots are re-calibrated to keep up with the rules and not make mistakes.

• Improved employee assurance: employees are relocated from repetitive tasks being automated to focus on value creation and rewarding positions.

Next: Five challenges when automating and unifying your digital ecosystem