RPA is one of the hottest topics regarding process improvement through automation and yet, organizations fail to scale it even after a successful POC.
Does any of you experienced a successful RPA scaling in a big organization? What was the approach, what were the challenges?
Thank you
Dear Ionut,
My experience with RPA from a vendor side (we have implemented RPA in a multinational company). Several are the challenges which may lead to uneffective scale after go - live and that's why we've made an explicit recommendation to the Customer's team.
1.The first begins from the start of the project - optimization of the process before automation. Make it simpler, decrease the number of the exceptions. Otherwise, after go-live some of the exceptions might be a real stoppers
2. The implemented solution should be maintained by the customer. When they have changes in the processes / integrated systems they should involve the support RPA vendor team
3. Employees should learn how to interact with the robots - what is the meaning of the messages that the robot sends and what is required by them. The employees should stick to the new standards of the process when they perform manually the exceptions . They should do it like the robot does. Otherwise, when the robot should interact with data with different standard he will not succeed.
4. Last but not least - developing one process does not mean the team should not think of the other dependant / linked processes. Implementing a scalable solution requires knowledge about all related processes not only about the process in the current scope
How to overcome :
Choose a vendor not only with RPA development knowledge but processes re-design and improvement as well.
Know what future state of your company you want. Think big and analyse processes deep. The analysis should be at least long as the development itself.
Train the customer's employees incl. IT and give a recommendation how to understand the robot's logic, maintain and scale by themselves and when to contact their support (RPA vendor)
Hope this would be helful. Staying in touch,
Milena Ribarova (Consultant and RPA vendor)