As organizations embark on their automation journeys, many enterprises are establishing centers of excellence (COEs) for their robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives. While the goal is simple to understand—ensure solutions are properly defined and deployed, the proper metrics are established and measured, and the solutions are aligned with key performance indicators—it is far less simple to execute.
One of the key challenges is ensuring that the governance and management of the COE doesn’t require massive amounts of time and energy. Given the strategic nature of RPA as a launching pad for advanced automation initiatives, it is vital that the COE isn’t allocating 80% of its resources on keeping the lights on instead of focusing on the critical business outcomes anticipated for RPA.
Why a COE Matters
First, it’s important to define what a COE is and its intents. A COE is a governance body—a group of people representing a wide swath of business units, stakeholders, technology centers and user constituencies. This governance body ensures that all key parts of the organization are represented when it comes to defining a goal, which in this case is use of automation in general and RPA specifically.
COE members shape what RPA is designed to do, how it does it, how to monitor progress and avoid obstacles, and so on. Their input on wants, needs, challenges, fears and rewards is a must. Having a diverse, well-represented and empowered COE is necessary for the long-term maintenance and upkeep of automation initiatives, the workflows that result from RPA and other automation efforts. Also, one or more individuals should have ownership responsibility for some aspect of RPA.
The COE should define and enable integration of all relevant technologies, business processes and co-dependencies to make the automation journey a smooth and successful one.
As organizations look at how to make their COE for RPA a sustainable competitive advantage, it’s important for them to acknowledge that RPA, although certainly strategic and valuable in its own right, is just one stepping-stone toward the broader goal: automation as a key driver of reinvention. Through intelligent automation, organizations can extract from their business processes unnecessary investments in time and costs, while enabling employees to become even more engaged in strategic, knowledge-based initiatives that contribute to digital transformation and becoming a digital-first organization.
Removing Growth Obstacles With Robotic Process Automation
This paper explains how Cobmax Sales Center, a telemarketing, sales, and customer service provider, turned to IBM’s Robotic Process Automation solution to help handle customer calls for one of Brazil’s largest telecommunications companies.
Download NowGiving Your COE a Chance to Succeed
In addition to putting RPA in the proper, broader context of intelligent automation, there are other things your organization can do to make your COE a strategic weapon:
- Put together a best-practice framework that prioritizes how to scale RPA initiatives easily and quickly by reusing assets, connectors and process mining to identify new ways to automate repetitive tasks.
- Don’t try to boil the ocean with RPA. You’ll be amazed how much more efficient and effective your processes will be when a series of mundane, tactical tasks are automated (and are properly owned by key COE members).
- Have a core foundation in place for governance to identify potential, inefficient overlaps in task automation.
- Identify and select an intelligent automation platform under which the RPA initiative operates. The key platform requirement should be to enable seamless integration of new functionalities, as well as both existing and future tools.
As a decades-long pioneer and innovator in automation, IBM provides the key technologies, business process knowledge and advisory skills organizations need to maximize the benefits of an RPA COE. IBM’s demonstrated ability and commitment to helping organizations get the most out of diverse, heterogeneous architectures makes it a logical partner for any organization trying to tackle RPA within an enterprise-wide intelligent automation framework.
IBM® Robotic Process Automation is a cloud-native solution designed to enable business and IT users to create automation tools and intelligent software robots, and execute repetitive tasks with artificial intelligence. This helps reduce the workload of employees so more of their time is spent on strategic thinking than tactical work. IBM’s expansive ecosystem of partners provides a wide range of services and tools to give COEs the broadest array of capabilities, knowledge and expertise available.
To learn more about IBM’s RPA solutions and services, please visit www.ibm.com/products/robotic-process-automation.
