One of the best options to use as you embark on your digital transformation path is robotic process automation (RPA). But knowing the advantages of RPA is one thing; putting it into practice for your business process without prior experience is a bit challenging. This write-up helps you know the step-by-step implementation method for RPA.

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation is a sophisticated technological tool that makes it easier to create, use, and monitor software bots that can mimic human behavior and interact with digital systems and software. In general, as compared to manual labor, it is equivalent to a bot performing tasks in a very quick manner. Software bots are created to work at high speed and more reliably than people while not requiring them to bother much. Here are a few well-known examples of RPA:

Scraping of Websites

RPA software is widely used nowadays to extract text and data from websites. Data extraction from popular websites, trade websites, items, and other sites is frequently done with RPA bots. This data is easier to retrieve and examine once they are extracted. Web scraping with RPA has several significant benefits, including:

• Mass download tasks are automated by it.
• Quick and simple setup.
• Lower costs and fewer errors.
• To keep scraping going, no crew is necessary.

Sales, Marketing, and Payroll Management

The sales and marketing departments are frequently the most profitable aspects of any firm, making them a prime area for implementing RPA programs. To generate leads and promote growth, you want to free up your sales team’s time from mundane activities so they can focus on closing deals.

Calculating employees’ net pay after considering taxes and deductions is a key task of payroll processing. It is a crucial and time-consuming process in every business. By implementing RPA, any payroll updates that matter are handled by the RPA bot. 

Call Center Operation

RPA approaches process management and data integration in a user-friendly manner. Automating program launches, mouse clicks, and field entries remove the need to transition between different apps by loading a whole client profile from numerous systems. The amount of time it takes to locate a customer in the system and review all of their information on a single screen is significantly reduced using RPA. The customer need not wait while the agent loads all the data, thusleading to better customer service and shorter average call duration.

Legal Process

Both independent law firms and in-house legal departments can profit from robotic process automation for legal procedures. This gives all of the highly skilled legal professionals more time to devote to what matters: understanding the law and giving clients the best legal advice possible. RPA automates processes on top of pre-existing systems, including e-discovery tools, contract management systems, spreadsheets, PDFs, scanned documents, websites, and apps. 

Healthcare Data Wiring

Healthcare professionals work hard to treat as many patients as they can with the highest standard of care. RPA is a tool that supports the process of digital transformation. It’s the wiring that links all of the data in all systems in a way that is quicker, more precise, and more effective than conventional IT approaches like intricate business process management systems and unique application program interfaces (APIs), among other things.

RPA Implementation Process

It’s important to keep in mind that RPA is a series process executed so that should be scaled incrementally following the business’ priorities. Here are the basics of the RPA implementation procedure. Having a well-planned implementation strategy enables you to make the most of the technology. The following steps make up the final RPA implementation journey:

Step 1: Initiating The Program

A successful RPA in any sector is based on having a clear business plan. How an RPA contributes to an organization gaining, is better understood during the planning phase. Having a planned execution can result in better outputs.

Step 2: Assessing Potential Opportunities

To get the greatest results, the organization’s process assessment is crucial. Be sure to concentrate on:

• Volumes of the input and output
• Procedure variation
• Automated value creation

Cost-benefit relationships should be directly impacted by the balance between volume and process variability. When evaluating the installation of RPA procedures, businesses should also take data protection, cyber security, and scalability into account.

Step 4: Deploy a Pilot

Run the pilot after obtaining conceptual evidence. Implementing this would help in reducing the bot inefficiencies significantly. Assess the bot’s performance in comparison to a manual process to make sure that the performance is as expected. This procedure aids in demonstrating the efficiency of the working procedure.

Step 5: Organizing Resources

Companies assemble cross-functional project teams and resources before pilot production. To make sure that corporate goals are aligned, the duties must be well defined. An effective strategy calls for a plan that encourages training programs and takes into account staff proposals and their possible effects.

Step 6: Create an Implementation Strategy

The easy implementation of RPA requires a full team of project managers, business analysts, operational employees, and RPA developers. This strategy must also include costs for further software development and maintenance.

Step 7: Execute and Monitor

Don’t forget to evaluate the performance of your bots once they are operational. Make sure they aren’t crowded. Consider the operational advantages and increased production. Here is a simple checklist to assist you in further streamlining the process

• List down the procedures you want to automate, starting with the simple ones.
• Conduct a feasibility analysis and confirm the effectiveness of the current procedures.
• Prepare for advanced robotics by taking app scalability and AI support into account.
• Addressing data privacy threats and creating an audit trail.
• Examine the RPA apps’ affordability.
• Adopt a Cooperative, Comprehensive Approach.

Select the Best RPA Vendor for Your RPA Implementation

RPA providers who can comprehend the objectives and provide you with specialized solutions are necessary to meet the diverse RPA deployment needs of various enterprises. To prevent any implementation bottlenecks, the following criteria should be taken into account while choosing an RPA vendor:

• Cost and duration of the bot deployment.
• Delivery of bots with the ability to manage financial complexity.
• Provisions for encrypting the data and guaranteeing its confidentiality and privacy
• Availability of an audit trail feature that logs all actions taken by the bot
• The vendor’s RPA bot should be non-intrusive and well-equipped to adjust to the times in terms of technology.

It is important to confirm the vendors’ technical abilities in addition to their organizational credentials.

Top 9 Advantages of RPA Implementation

The advantages of implementing RPA technologies include increasing productivity, enhancing employee engagement, reducing time to market, and increasing revenue. Implementing RPA successfully can lead to tactical and strategic benefits. When different activities must be handled in different ways, especially for large businesses, this increases costs and complexity. However, the advantages provided by RPA make this technology adaptable:

1. Being economical

According to estimates, utilizing robotics can reduce operational costs by up to 25–50%. In contrast to humans, who work 8 to 5 and have a certain number of yearly vacation days each year, robots can run nonstop. Robots replacing a few of the labor-intensive work that humans perform could benefit companies across various sectors. One can recover the money invested in the automation once it’s properly implemented.

2. Reliability & quality

RPA is a reliable service in operational procedures where there are possibilities of human errors. Robots have significantly impacted the places where nonstop execution of programs is required without disruption. They also raise the quality of output and reduce the possibilities of any rework. The finest aspect of this situation is that robots strictly adhere to the rules, delivering 100% accuracy in the process results. RPA maximizes organizational capacity-expanding capacities. Robotics is a safe, non-intrusive technology that offers flawless uniformity in carrying out tasks across the board, every time. It doesn’t interfere with the underlying processes.

3. Better Analytics

Access to accurate data from a variety of sources would raise the caliber of analytics as a result. This improves decision-making and, ultimately, the way that processes are carried out.

4. Enhanced workforce productivity

RPA ultimately enables both humans and robots to perform their best work. Employees can concentrate more on client and customer engagement, relationship management, and other areas where people naturally excel as RPA frees them from their tedious responsibilities. Happily satisfied consumers and clients can greatly impact the growth of the business.

5. Client Satisfactio

Customer and client happiness rises when work is delivered with higher caliber, more accuracy, and improved customer/client engagement. This simply enhances the company’s reputation.

6. Quicker

A huge amount of work can be completed in a shorter period when compared to the traditional way since bots are handling the execution. Automation is considered to execute tasks more speedily and accurately.

7. Consolidation from Various Systems

RPA makes use of various tools such as big data and the cloud to aggregate data and information from different systems, and produce data that enables synchronizing various systems to work together without any interruption.

8. Flexibility

RPA fits a variety of ecosystems and accomplishes tasks and this is considered one of the useful applications. Any rule-based procedure or repeatable task is ideal for RPA execution.

9. Improved IT Management and Support

RPA enhances the service desk’s efficiency and network monitoring. This helps businesses to withstand brief spikes without having to hire more staff or train existing employees.

Implementation Challenges for RPA

Despite the apparent ease of RPA installation, particularly when you have a tech-savvy RPA provider advising you, there are still some risks and difficulties you should be aware of before beginning.

• Unclear expectations and aspirations

Even though the majority of businesses are aware of the benefits that RPA may offer, the first step to achieving those benefits is setting clear objectives and realistic expectations. Clarifying these objectives from the beginning was the major starting point for 86% of the firms that deployed RPA to achieve and surpass their business goals, according to Deloitte.

• Standardization of processes

It becomes difficult to automate any process with increasing complexity. To achieve complete process standardization, it is required to divide the process into standardized tasks and automate each one at a time.

• IT assistance

Companies pursuing digital transformation must be supported by the newest technological know-how. Lack of IT assistance is a problem that may be overcome by working with a tech-savvy vendor who is in charge of both developing the solution and offering adaptable, engaging models.

• Mindset and culture

Although just 17% of businesses implementing pilot RPA projects encountered employee resistance, RPA adoption still requires adjustments to company culture and employee attitudes. In actuality, this entails giving the RPA-replaced staff more imaginative, non-automatable jobs.

How Long Does it Take to Implement RPA?

It is important to examine and identify the complexity of the operations that have been targeted for automation as soon as possible. By doing this, organizations can obtain a precise project timetable and prevent needless postponements of their deployment schedule at a later time, saving both time and money.

The timeline for implementing RPA will be impacted by the complexity of the process. A process’ level of complexity is determined by its scope, objectives, business rules, the number of apps and tools the bots must access, its criticality, and other factors.RPA project difficulty can be divided into three categories:

• Low-complexity RPA projects
• Middle-level RPA projects
• Complex RPA projects

1. RPA projects with minimal complexity

The following procedures are frequently used in low-complexity RPA projects:

• Requirement and analysis
• Design
• Build and test
• User acceptance testing
• Deployment

Low-complexity processes are often quick to implement, taking 3 to 4 weeks on average, depending on several factors. Low-complexity processes are those that are simple and have few business rules, fewer applications or systems, and little to no decision-making.

2. RPA projects with moderate complexity

Since a carefully considered and comprehensive design is a key element of an effective RPA implementation, the design phase alone can take two to three weeks for processes classified as medium complexity.

Medium-complexity project implementation could take up to 6 or 7 weeks altogether. There are more business rules, decision points, applications, and fail-safe techniques included in high-complexity projects than in low-complexity projects, hence it takes more time to implement them than low-complexity processes do. However, the stages stay the same.

3. RPA projects with high complexity

It takes significantly more effort to complete complex operations of this complexity than it does to complete lower- and medium-level initiatives, and as a result, they frequently take longer than anticipated.

Timelines of 10 to 12 weeks are not unusual for highly complex processes, and they can even take longer. Any schedule for implementing RPA that is longer than ten weeks will undoubtedly be complicated. Applications, numerous business rules, process specialists’ interventions, crucial duties, compliance and regulation effects, as well as consumer experiences, are all things included. All of this would imply that even a minor modification to an application’s workflow could influence the aforementioned KPIs.

High-complexity processes frequently require additional tools or technologies, such as cognitive image extraction tools, that the bots rely on for input. Therefore, throughout the decision-making stage, having a grasp of the project’s complexity is essential.

Final Thoughts

Businesses frequently encounter difficulties when implementing RPA. This is primarily due to inaccurate assessments of the specific activities that need to be automated and enterprises’ lack of readiness for them or rejection of RPA design and integration. Rootfacts can help in adopting RPA that is effective and successful. It meets the basic concerns without putting the company’s interests at risk. You need not worry about decisions made at the beginning of an RPA implementation project which can be expensive and result in delays and cost overruns. However, your firm can achieve success quickly with our assistance by using the correct road map, specifications, production objectives, team, and experience are engaged. Never forget to visit our page at Rootfacts to know more about our services.