Automation can alleviate stresses that companies experience with complicated business processes and disconnected systems. But many organizations are unable to build or deploy new technologies on their own.
IT departments might be too focused elsewhere to kick-start the automation process. Meanwhile, employee frustration grows from repetitive, labor-intensive operations such as data entry and data management. How can companies start an automation journey?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a flexible automation tool that can serve as a core building block for business efficiency. RPA uses bots to perform burdensome manual tasks that humans typically handle.
With RPA in place, employees can move beyond mundane activities and focus on more rewarding work. They can use bots to perform jobs such as pulling activity from websites, checking payroll accuracy, sorting vendor emails, and managing data.
Organizations can accomplish automation by embarking on a four-stage journey to successful RPA implementation:
RPA implementation can offer enormous benefits, which can grow even more when RPA is coupled with a center of excellence (CoE). The CoE supports comprehensive solutions within a strong governance framework.
But even RPA solutions that start small can have a long lead-in time and high initial costs. That’s why many automation journeys start by reducing the barrier to entry with RPA as a service (RPAaaS) and CoE as a service. RPAaaS can integrate automation smoothly, while CoE as a service helps manage licenses, maintain bots, resolve help desk issues, optimize strategies, and design effective controls.
An experienced team can provide these ongoing services to:
Once the returns on automation investments start, businesses can build out their capabilities for even better results. Companies can move away from RPAaaS and create their own teams for developing and managing bots.
As automation begins handling more processes, businesses will need to understand what’s happening under the hood for better optimization and to meet regulatory needs. An automation audit can help detect bot operations that could function more efficiently and confirm that the automations support regulatory compliance.
Even though RPAaaS and CoE as a service can continue delivering results throughout the automation journey, businesses might decide to graduate the CoE component to an in-house team as they expand toward enterprise automation.
This internal team of functional, technical, and process specialists can position RPA for growth as other areas of the business take note of successful automation and become interested in developing and using their own bots. A shift toward enterprise automation can lead to to fewer downstream errors and faster turnaround times while garnering more support for automation advancements.
As automation gains traction across the organization, bots can come with more technologies and integrations. This hyperautomation state combines existing RPA implementations with new predictive capabilities and tools such as machine learning, intelligent optical character recognition, and artificial intelligence.
Properly piecing together your automation solution is an ongoing journey, and relying on an experienced team with a history of successful implementations can help you get a stronger return on your investment and achieve better results quickly.
Crowe can help you explore how automation can work for you, provide guidance and ongoing support, and work toward an automation solution that delivers a combination of services you need.
