DIY RPA is not something impossible, especially for some enterprises with a powerful & experienced IT/Digital transformation team. However, this article will focus more on the highlights you should consider when doing RPA for your enterprise, whatever you are having a DIY RPA or working with a vendor. Let’s always think about it as your DIY RPA project – with this attitude you can always accelerate the journey and reach your target soon.
Table of Contents
1. A clear mindset of RPA strategy
Source: akaBot
- Strategy for Automation Transformation: RPA is not just about extracting and moving data, businesses need to clearly understand the purposes and factors that they want to improve through RPA, quality improvement, better regulatory compliance, better customer and employee satisfaction, etc. There are many ways RPA can change your business, and each business will have a different way of applying it, performing different results.
- Roadmap for Strategic Planning: Once you have your business case proven after initial assessment, businesses need to develop a roadmap to take advantage of RPA, including short term tactical gains and long term strategic improvements. From considering how and where to start applying RPA, to building a virtual workforce system and all the things involved, such as Tool, POC (Proof of Concept), Pilots, PD (Production Deployment), CoE (Center of Excellence), etc. There’s more to consider than you ever think!
- Choosing Tools: You need to make sure that the tools and vendors you choose are right for your business. Because each vendor has a different strength, some vendors do better with ERP (Enterprise resource planning) software, other vendors may be stronger at OCR (Optical character recognition). The outputs from automation assessment & strategy and road-map as mentioned above will have a huge influence on this decision.
- Increasing your capacity: If the business just simply “carries” the bots from one place to another, the effect will only be a short-lived moment. There are many factors such as people, processes, business context, IT background, administration and maintenance systems, security, auditability, commitment model, and delivery model that need to be weighed upon to ensure a successful bot application. Moreover, the ability to use bots and staff training to use bots are also extremely important in determining the success of RPA adoption.
- Continuous enhancement & maintenance: Once a business has implemented bots into the workflow, it is crucial to note that maintenance and upgrading of bots need to be done regularly. This will require a large team of IT staff and related departments who understand RPA technology in general and adapted bots in particular. To ensure that the benefits received continuously grow, maintenance and upgrading of RPA is indispensable.
2. IT staff with adequate foundational understanding of RPA technology & platform
Source: Internet
While it is not necessary to have extensive knowledge of RPA which includes designing, building, and deploying like an RPA developer, all IT staff in a business still need a basic knowledge of RPA technology to be able to use it proficiently in a working environment. At FPT Software, the E-learning course “akaBot Development Foundation” provides all the foundational knowledge about RPA technology and how to apply RPA in businesses. This is a completely free E-learning course designed for people working in a technology environment, especially IT staff.
3. Outsourcing RPA vendors
Source: Internet
Up to now, along with the massive amount of knowledge and skills of RPA technology, it is difficult for most businesses to have a training in-house team who are expertise in RPA. Therefore, calling in the experts and specialists from vendors is an optimal choice. Vendors will have a professional and comprehensive view of the business picture, from which to advise on suitable products, training RPA knowledge to personnel, providing support and optimal ways to work with RPA bots.
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