Robotic Process Automation is hot! In fact, according to Gartner, “Robotic process automation (RPA) is the fastest-growing software segment. It grew more than 63% in 2018, compared with 13.3% growth in the overall enterprise software market and 14.6% growth in the application infrastructure and middleware market1."
And while a lot of companies have dipped their toes into the water, many are finding it difficult to move beyond that initial pilot.
Why? Well once you’ve automated the obvious, low-hanging-fruit tasks (like a repetitive cut and paste from one system to another, re-populating a form, etc.), it’s difficult to determine what to automate next.
Forrester has a simple formula of five for determining if a process is ripe for RPA: No more than five decisions, five applications, and 500 clicks2. Personally, I’d add one more factor to this formula: no more than 5 process variants or ways of executing the task/process. Why? Process variations are one of the hardest data points to capture, understand the why and when of it, and then automate it.
Companies rely on the work of business process experts (both in-house and consultants) for RPA process selection. Analysts and consultants may spend thousands of hours to observe, document and then streamline and/or re-engineer processes in order to identify and prioritize processes for automation as part of continuous improvement programs.
Yet these process maps constantly need to be updated due to process, system or regulatory changes.
What if there was an easier way?
Verint Robotic Process Automation Discovery automates the analysis of processes for RPA process selection. It not only determines which ones are prime for RPA automation, but it will prioritize these automations based on impact—even estimating the ROI that could be achieved.
Here’s how it works.
- Discovery Robots sit on a group of employee desktops that perform similar tasks/processes
- Using Computer Vision technologies, the robots record activity, events and applications
- AI algorithms convert the data into visual process maps and automation workflows, including ALL process variants
- The automation recommendation engine prioritizes and recommends tasks/processes for automation based on weighted values for volume, frequency, complexity, handle times, and estimated cost savings of automating the task or process.
This approach gives you a much broader sampling of people performing the task/process than you would receive in the traditional method of an analyst/consultant observing a few people.
In addition, when observed people tend to do what they think they should do, vs. what they typically do. By recording all actions, you get a more realistic picture of how work is processed, and you are more likely to capture those process variants I discussed earlier.
Once you’ve reviewed the recommendations and decided which tasks/processes to automate, the automation workflows can be imported directly into Verint RPA Authoring Studio, in order to speed robot development and deployment time.
You can then take the Discovery Robots and place them on another set of employee desktops, quickly identifying opportunities for RPA automation at scale and maximizing your automation investment.
Organizations can move beyond automating the simple, low-hanging fruit tasks to leveraging RPA for revenue generation, compliance, improved quality and customer satisfaction.
Have you hit a roadblock in your RPA journey? What’s keeping you from expanding RPA across the enterprise? Share your comments below.
Want to learn more about moving beyond an RPA Pilot? Read the blog post: How to Scale RPA Beyond a Pilot.
1 Market Share Analysis: Robotic Process Automation, Worldwide, 2018, May 23, 2019
2 Use RPA To Deliver Better Customer Service Experiences, Forrester, November 6, 2019