Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been instrumental in reaping faster business outcomes across divisions in most organizations. This is mainly because it gives you the luxury of creating your own software bots to automate your desired business processes. The bots don’t only help save long, tiring manual productivity hours, but also offers precision and accuracy to the mix. Organizations have eventually started working on the notion of “automate or die” in their business strategies.

However, implementing a successful RPA project might not be a cakewalk for many organizations. A recent survey reveals that more than 40% of RPA projects fail to deliver outputs due to lack of right process selection, clear strategy and responsibility.

As Bernard Marr in Forbes puts it, more than 60% of the technological failures are in fact due to lack of visibility, and only 3% are caused by technical problems.

Although RPA is getting the green signal almost everywhere, organizations find it harder to scale up a pilot project to an established business process, as it needs careful maintenance. There are several loud challenges that organizations face while deploying an RPA project.

In order to implement RPA “the right way” and leverage the technology to the fullest, you must be aware of the pitfalls in robotic process automation right before initiating an automation project.

Following are a list of 7 areas that needs your attention if you are craving for a smoother RPA transformation.

1. Identifying the right process to automate

Picking the right process is a quintessential area for an effective start of an automation project. At any cost, you should never compromise on performing a thorough process mining by making a realistic evaluation of a task that you might want to pawn it off to robots. You don’t want to start automating some random process just because it reduces the workload.

Our two cents for you to choose the right process is that you should consider parameters such as process complexity, productivity time, and the business impact of the process.

2. Identifying backlog of automations

After picking the best process to automate, organizations need to ensure that they are getting the most out of that process. It would only be wise to scale up the bots based on the requirements of the process – otherwise they could end up with hundreds.

Instead, for each licensed bot you deploy, ensure that the bot is working at its full capacity such that you can reduce the complexities and scale up your bots gradually.

3. Payback for automation

As we get to the business end of the automation project, monitoring results and supporting the system are the keys to scale up your process for your business growth. You will need your software bots to deliver business intelligence to measure its performance and ROI.

Even if you have invested a huge amount to automate a particular process, you get to know if you are achieving your desired ROI and whether the process is meeting the organization’s expectations.

4. Cultural resistance

Welcoming a change in your organization is harder than you think. The higher-ups in your organization might think RPA will not suit their budgets and the employees would believe that their jobs will be in jeopardy once they start feeding their codes in automation servers.

Since, the employees might have many questions in their mind, it’s important to work patiently with them and address their concerns. If not, getting sponsorship from the senior management to start an automation project will be a huge challenge.

5. Ineffective Change Management

This is probably due to the culture resistance by the employees to welcome automation. If you want to automate a particular process, you need to optimize the existing workflow to make it automation-compliant and that the employees need to be trained to use an automation tool. The reluctance to receive training forces them to completely rely on the IT department.

Our piece of advice is that optimizing the process is for the greater good and an extensive course of training should be acquired from your automation partner.

6. Choosing the right automation platform

While choosing an automation platform, organizations tend to go only for the one that fits their budget and with limited capabilities. Giving enough attention while choosing the right automation tool is instrumental to reduce costs,  and also prevent any negative impacts to productivity and results due to delayed schedules.

It is advisable to choose the platform that has broader capabilities and a better integration landscape so that your organization can quickly adapt to it and waste no time in initiating an automation project.

7.Choosing the right partner

When you reach out to a partner for an automation project, ensure that they offer end-to-end automation services, support center that works round the clock in case you face difficulties while automating, and a complete guide of training materials. A handful of automation success stories will be an added advantage.

RPA has become instrumental to business processes and you need to ensure you are embracing the technology to take the most advantage of it if you hope to stay competitive. Following our advice, we hope you avoid falling into these traps and wish to see you embark on a successful RPA journey with a trusted partner like Aspire.

Automated business process discovery

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