According to Forrester, 25% of companies are struggling to meet their ROI targets regarding RPA. Discover how to get the most of it!
The limits of RPA
The value proposition of RPA seems irrefutable: cut costs out of rework, repeatable, or even predictable tasks by automating them. The reality is far from this proposition, and the reasons why are also clear:
- You should automate only when you have a clear vision of your processes. Even if it sounds obvious, only a high volume of repeated tasks justifies RPA investment. What is not obvious is to have a clear vision of what is going on your processes in reality! Don’t go too fast and have a deep analysis of what step of your processes needs automation.
- Automate when your processes are ready to be! Processes are thought and implemented away from reality. When you operate them, gaps occur because of the reality of the field. Before automating, make sure that your processes are coherent with this reality and that you have standardized them, and that you don’t have too many variations nor non-compliance.
- Automate when you have identified hidden costs of implementing RPA: indirect licenses due to external tools, bot governance, people dedicated to maintenance and fixes when you have failures, etc.
- Automate when you will be able to measure the ROI!
For those reasons, among others, Process Mining and RPA are known to be the best tandem to bring ROI.
The interest of Process Mining
Thanks to logs in your IT, Process Mining will help you:
- To discover the way your processes are operated in the field. You will first identify bottlenecks, reworks, non-compliances, and act on your processes to standardize them and make them efficient.
- To easily understand the root causes of process variations and give the first level of optimization.
- To have a clear vision of your processes, that you have made those first modifications you will have a clear view of where rework and repeatable actions are the biggest.
RPA x Process Mining
Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, says that “Hyperautomation is irreversible and inevitable. Everything that can and should be automated will be automated”. So, the question is not whether large companies must work on automation but rather how to get the best of it.
Process Mining is certainly the best way to make sure you will get the biggest ROI and make sure that RPA is scalable within your organization.