Companies of all sizes are looking to robotic process automation (RPA) vendors for help in achieving the holy grail of efficiency: Do more with less. Executives quickly realize the benefits of using automation for repetitive, time-consuming tasks. But what they don’t realize—and what RPA vendors often fail to represent—is what automation really is.
Automation is a discipline spanning multiple areas and bodies of knowledge to solve a common business problem: productivity. The misconception about automation lies in the details.
Workers are usually task-oriented and not process-oriented. By focusing on task automation rather than process automation, you can harvest early benefits that will help your business case. But analyzing individual tasks instead of seeing them as part of a larger process will eventually render the automation unusable, jeopardizing the true value and viability of automation.
Here are some pitfalls to avoid when undertaking an automation project:
- False analogies: This refers to simply reusing a process template that is similar on the surface to the one being executed but that differs in critical aspects.
- Going to production by decree: It’s easy to cut corners in the name of urgency. For instance, don’t build an automation development and deployment schedule backwards from a deadline using estimates from those who aren’t involved in doing the actual work.
- Subjectivity: Task automation analyses typically include excessive self-confidence and a series of other cognitive biases. They often lack things like rules deviation, proper detailing, escalation paths and other non-functional requirements.
- Coordination negligence: Processes consist of many tasks that must be carefully coordinated and integrated. The amount of time and effort required to do that is usually overlooked or underestimated—or even completely ignored—by project decision-makers.
- Too many macro tasks: Macro tasks are comprised of smaller, interconnected tasks within a specific arrangement. Teams usually take shortcuts by estimating macro tasks directly, rather than by adding subtask estimates.
Projects exhibiting any of the above are prone to delay or breakage, as bots will start to leak everywhere and will need to be put to bed. Take the time and be diligent to set your automation projects up for success.
Use Bots to Power Workflow
There is no business process without collaboration, and there is no collaboration without some form of workflow. The greatest benefits result from the integration of bots into workflows, generating clear, well-defined, end-to-end vision and scope of business processes.
Pairing bots with workflows enhances bot stability, as unmapped scenarios (or exceptions) can be sent as tasks to people and work can be resumed by bots once those tasks are completed.
Depicting the entire business process with workflows also has a great side effect: No bot will be left behind, which means anytime a revision or change to a process is required, people will realize from the start that there is a bot in the loop interlocked with other tasks.
Trading Up: Shipment Tracking Automation that Benefits Process and People
Read this paper to learn how Inter Aduaneira, a Brazilian international trade consultancy, turned to IBM’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which freed up their analysts’ resources to apply their skills to creating better customer relationship.
Download NowSee the Future: AI-Powered Automation
Predicting process changes is paramount to the automation journey. Artificial intelligence is essential here because it not only solves problems but also discovers new patterns and proposes improvements to achieve goals that would be completely missed otherwise.
Technologies such as business activity monitoring are now supercharged with AI into something widely known as process mining. This enables organizations to not only see how processes are being executed but actually simulate changes in processes.
Process mining reveals bottlenecks, service-level agreement issues, process exceptions, non-conformant processes and RPA opportunities. It helps businesses save analysis time and get objective results, while also simulating automation impact before engaging developments. It’s a must-have for an instrumented, fact-based automation journey.
When it comes to RPA, don’t let the attraction of automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks distract your organization from the bigger picture. Focus instead on process automation to gain the game-changing benefits that such technology can generate for your business.
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