Once an organization takes initial steps of conducting pilots and automating a few processes, they face the challenge of charting out a roadmap for RPA enablement. This requires prioritizing business processes for their RPA missions. Having helped several organizations, we have gathered experience of how to best select and prioritize process for RPA-enablement.
- Feasibility – Different processes have varying levels of feasibility of RPA-enablement. RPA deployment is most suitable when a process has pre-defined business logic, known sources of data and a stable, well-defined processes. On the other hand, if a process requires making judgment-based decisions, they don’t make good bet for automation. With progress in Intelligent automation, more and more processes involving cognitive skills are becoming feasible to be RPA-enabled. Intelligent reading of various documents like PDF invoices or decision-based processing of candidate profiles by HR department is increasingly becoming feasible using RPA.
- Process Quality improvement – RPA brings in better benefits when maintaining process quality in terms of low error rates or handling large volume of data is critical. Typically, when files are processed manually in MS Excel sheets or data is processed manually, the chance of errors is high. RPA brings certainty and quality assurance to processes. Further, when RPA processes tasks, it is easier to monitor quality through automated MIS report generation.
- Operational Governance – RPA helps bring in better process governance and reduce process risks. This is because RPA enables better data security, stringent process controls, tight application access rights and automatic audit trails. Therefore processes that need better governance are best candidates for RPA enablement.
- Return on Investment – To achieve high Return on Investment on RPA, it is critical that right processes are chosen for RPA enablement. RoI is higher when RPA is deployed for processes which have higher transaction volumes and greater frequency, involve high manual processing and greater opportunities for reengineering. Since RPA can function 24*7, they can handle high volumes continuously, it results in increasing the productivity and throughput.
Some of the most common processes taken up for automation include Invoice processing, Tax processing, Bank reconciliation and MIS generation as they qualify on most of the parameters mentioned above.