Automate high-volume, repeatable tasks.
Focus on high-value,customer-centric work.
RPA – a revolutionary solution for intelligent automation
Demystifying RPA
Robotic Process Automation has been disrupting industries with its substantial ability to automate the high-volume repetitive tasks over the past few years. When mundane tasks are automated, human employees can make more room in their schedule for creative value-added tasks. This way, RPA enables humans and machines to do what they do best. Research suggests that RPA implementations improve productivity by 27% and compliance by 38%, resulting in a minimum ROI of 2X. As a result, 58% of the organizations have already kickstarted their RPA journey and the technology expects a global adoption in the next 5 years. This explains why the global RPA market is growing at a whopping CAGR of 33.6% and is expected to hit $11 Billion by 2027.
Building an RPA Strategy
Organizations are shifting towards automating repetitive and tedious processes through Robotic Process Automation (RPA), thus enabling employees to concentrate on more cognitive activities. AI, ML, NLP, and OCR are transforming deterministic rule-based automation into Intelligent Automation where the process of deciding the areas to be automated is itself being automated. Thanks to Augmented Analytics. Organizations have realized that implementing an end-to-end automation solution involves leveraging the appropriate technologies and requires the inclusion of tools, process workflows, and underlying data. When pieced together without sufficient process mining, these implementations can result in negative ROI. So, it is critical to understand the dos and don’ts of building an RPA strategy before diving into the automation vogue.
The Six Step RPA Framework
While there are differing opinions on “the right RPA strategy framework”, there is no right or wrong answer to it as the concept is subjective to each business. To thrive in a company-wide RPA operating model, it should inevitably align with your unique business model and the digital strategy. Strategically defining a model sets the framework for potential automation developments by building a stable base, incorporating main factors such as strong governance, standardized procedures, and effective communications. In addition, the preparation process helps you to study the effects that your RPA approach is likely to have on your organization before even implementing it. Below, we discuss six steps that comprehensively cover the aforementioned processes that are critical to enterprise-wide RPA planning.
1) Process Discovery:
The first step is to examine your organizational fit for RPA through a data-centric approach, which is unbiased in contrast to human decision making. This will help you decipher the areas that require automation and the readiness of your organization for an operational shift of such magnitude. Process mining is an essential step for this process and fortunately, technologies like hyperautomation and augmented analytics are improving the precision and accuracy of decision making.
2) Shortlisting Vendors:
When shortlisting your RPA vendor, it is essential to leverage a comprehensive due diligence to work in tandem with a data-driven approach rather than just taking the leap of faith. While the selection of an RPA vendor might be subjective to each business, there are several elements that you need to consider irrespective of the industry you operate in. The quality of customer support, round-the-clock implementation, sufficient training materials to guide you throughout your RPA journey, ease of implementation, and the scalability of the platform should be evaluated when you are assessing your potential RPA vendors. The product roadmap is another element that would help you understand the vendor’s commitment to innovation.
3) Proof of Concept:
A POC is a definite means of authenticating the RPA concept for your unique business context in the real-world scenario. It demonstrates how automation performs on the sample process and the numerous advantages it can provide to an organization over the long term. A POC will validate and verify the application concept for your business case assumptions. An ideal POC is treated more like a project itself with a clear objective, pre-defined project timelines, and allotment of resources. It generally takes 2-3 weeks time frame to be implemented, which substantially is a short time to view the results.
4) RPA pilot:
An RPA pilot is the combination of POC and the actual implementation. A POC costs less than a pilot implementation and requires a briefer time frame due to its limited scope. The scope of a pilot is larger than a POC, but smaller than a full-scale enterprise-wide implementation. Also, the pilot is more polished than a POC for the end-user. Here, businesses deploy automated processes into everyday operations and evaluate the impact based on predefined success criteria. Given the augmented depth provided by a pilot, they also cost roughly the same as a full-scale implementation.
5) RPA Center of Excellence:
A Center of Excellence (CoE) is the process of embedding RPA deeply into the organization, and redistributing the gained knowledge and resources for future deployments. In this step, you build a hub to implement and adopt RPA and focus the implementation on all business functions with a sophisticated development environment to help your organization scale the RPA.
6) Expansion:
The CoE communicates achievements and priorities of RPA deployment, optimizes automated workforce, and determines additional automation processes. Preconfigured bots and the automated workforce will assist in accelerated scaling. This process is accompanied by a digital transition. Once executed successfully, RPA becomes part of your business’ DNA as the automation of highly complicated processes changes the nature of your operational model.
A few Dos and Don’ts
| Dos | Dont's |
|---|---|
| Educate your workforce on how RPA will strengthen their role. Also, assure them that it will not replace them. This will help your employees embrace RPA more enthusiastically | Do not rush. Poorly implemented automation would become vulnerable to errors, dangerous bias, and broken experiences. |
| Develop and train RPA processes with a diverse workforce in order to prevent bias in the design. | Understand the areas that cannot function well with automation. Automation should not be everywhere. Create a balanced hybrid infrastructure. |
| Only introduce automation into the actual environment after thorough tests with your workforce trained alongside. | Democratize the automation data across the organization. Siloed AI creates obstacles that affect a clean transition. |
| Strike a balance in organizational culture by synergizing the strengths of humans and automation. Focus on creating the best of both worlds. | Start small and expand step by step. Do not implement automation across the organization in one go. |
| As automation takes on the mundane tasks, train employees with more value-added skills that would help them use their human potential to the maximum. | Do not automate the processes that you will only need for the short term to avoid negative ROI. Focus on the ever-green processes that would remain in your business irrespective of the market dynamics. |
How RPA augments your ERP capabilities
Enterprise-wide Resource Planning (ERP) is a software with all your operations comprehensively integrated into a single User Interface. It creates transparency by combining all the requirements of the company into a single database, thus creating data democracy across the organization and mitigating data silos. RPA takes the ERP to the next level by eliminating the labor-intensive areas of managing an ERP. RPA software can automate repetitive tasks like data entry and report generation, enabling you to reap the maximum benefits of your ERP. Not only does RPA make ERP simpler, it also eases business growth. For example, if you’re bringing on a significant number of new customers every quarter, RPA helps you scale your ERP to accommodate the new data. Here is a list of some benefits of incorporating RPA into your ERP:
Centralization with ERP eliminates data silos and provides a comprehensive view of the organizational data which would enable you to make better decisions. For example:
Which vendor gives you the best price and the best chance of meeting a committed delivery date?
Which employees are not performing well?
Which of your channel partners need your support?
The technology is an essential part of Percipere, enabling clients to clearly understand their execution capacity and the execution gaps before putting automation in action. To enable companies to execute at maximum capacity, they require flexible processes, and that flexibility can only come through a deep understanding of how things are working and where shifts are possible. ERP enables quick process audits and detects potential issues before they impact your business, thus ensuring efficiency and compliance. Here is a list of some common use cases of integrating RPA and ERP:
- Automation of data entry and data migration in ERP
- Execution of SAP uploads and downloads
- Form population
- Data fields comparison
- ERP integration with third party applications
- Automated in ERP
- Data Scraping
- Identifying anomalies in processes and flagging them for review
- Data mining
- Monitoring emails
Percipere’s RPA Service
Percipere is a global expert in ERP Integration and consulting, serving multinational brands in Europe, India, and the Middle East across industries. Featuring leading process integrators who provide holistic end-to-end solutions, Percipere offers unique proof of concepts tailored for specific business contexts. According to research, 70-80% of the rule-based processes can be automated including the labor-intensive ones like customer service, recruitment, processing of invoices and refunds, sales orders, payroll, data extraction from different formats, customer record maintenance, etc. For this purpose, Percipere has created an exclusive playbook of implemented RPA ideas for ready-to-use functions. In addition to the playbook, Percipere has crafted multiple tools for RPA including the evaluation simulator that helps businesses assess how they can fit RPA into their organizations.
3. RPA – Empowering Business across Industries
Automate
Supplier Invoices
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Automated
Purchasing Based on
Inventory Levels
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Procurement
Contract
Management
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Bank
Reconciliation
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Monthly Payroll Processing
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Automate
SAP Production
Planning Masters
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Intercompany
Reconciliations
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Sales Order
Automation
Business Challenges
Solution
Benefits
Percipere is a new age company focused on bringing the right solution to the Businesses to accelerate growth and transformation. Percipere is headquartered in London and has operations across Europe, Middle East, India, and Canada.
