Process Management 3 mins read

Lots of bots? Use an RPA center of excellence

But what if you could manage an RPA implementation, plus maximize/prove return on investment (ROI)? You can with an effective Center of Excellence (CoE).

Tom Thaler Tom Thaler

Making the jump into robotic business process automation can be scary.

So, if you decide to go big into RPA – leveraging the use of “lots of bots” to cross-functionalize, optimize and automate everything – you can scare away even the most ambitious of cross-functional teams.

Once you try to work across departments, you’ve gone from a linear straightforward implementation to a wide-scale expansion of technology that could go haywire at any moment. So, naturally, when you bring up RPA in a large corporation with multiple divisions you might hear your teams say: “Scale and risk and numerous hiccups in implementation? No thanks!”

But what is you could not just manage the RPA implementation, but also maximize and prove return on investment (ROI)?

You can with an effective Center of Excellence (CoE). To go for full-scale RPA – with the added complexity of lots of bots – you need to establish your CoE with the right factors in play. Go big – but go big with centralization to monitor, automate and control these:

  • Continuous process improvement
  • Repair and maintenance
  • Exception handling
  • Full data translation

Bear in mind that your CoE working with these capabilities should not operate as a department per se. The job of the CoE is not to simply perform certain operational tasks better than other divisions. Rather, organizationally, your CoE will be the underpinning for all other departments, simply finding the best practices necessary for collective success.

What your CoE should NOT have:

  1. Indifference – A CoE that doesn’t bother to see what’s possible for RPA when improving a department, because the department doesn’t “need” the potential, is a recipe for failure.
  2. Complication – The biggest mistake your company could make is to assume that launching your own CoE for RPA would be a massive undertaking. It’s not. You just need the right team, doing the best research. You’re not reinventing any wheels.
  3. Avoidance – Some CoE’s will be reactive, waiting to see what will happen with those lots of bots. While solutions can be reached, a proactive CoE can not only develop the solution, but prevent any hiccups before they happen.

Keep in mind that RPA isn’t necessarily a plug n’ play, run-and-done affair. Once those bots start working, someone has to monitor them. Someone has to refine them. Someone, especially, has to maintain them (because they will undoubtedly break down from time to time).

The way to ensure operations within the RPA environment move smoothly is to centralize all of the above in a way that allows full access of the data, the AI, and process mining aspects. This where our Automation Anywhere partnership comes in, optimizing the power of RPA at a central level with clear buy-in, loyalty and cross-functionality.

Make no mistake, RPA can – and often should – start off small. But to truly benefit from the advantage of RPA automation, don’t worry about robots taking over the world, or about overextending your IT department. You can make RPA work for you in productive ways.

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