Gartner recommended 3 steps to start your Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Journey

Robotic process automation (RPA) technology has already gained the tremendous interest of many enterprises for its ability to impact business outcomes with a significant return on investment (RoI) within weeks. But many of them struggle to successfully launch RPA initiatives that can deliver desired RoI and be sustainable over time.

According to Gartner, “RPA has democratized integration and automation, leading to growing business adoption. However, application leaders often struggle to identify and prioritize the most suitable use cases, select the right vendor and perform the right POC. As a result, many RPA initiatives fail, thereby delaying project timelines and increasing the long-term total cost of ownership.”

Moreover, the process of RPA vendor selection makes it overwhelming for leaders to make a non-biased and informed decision.

Gartner has recommended three simple steps that application leaders can take now to start their RPA journey. Let us take a look at those steps in detail.

Gartner, 3 Steps to Start Your RPA Journey, 26 January 2021, Naved Rashid, Saikat Ray. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Nividous.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

As discussed, looking deeper into each step below:

“Identify and select suitable use cases”:

Gartner recommends, “Application leaders should test their use cases across stability, scalability, scope and complexity parameters to identify and select the most suitable use case for RPA.”

It is important to first identify RPA-eligible use cases and we, at Nividous, conduct a workshop, engaging closely with the customer team to help them ideate and identify the best process to start with. This preliminary stage is the very foundation of the success of any automation project. At this discovery stage, we help the leaders find those processes that are stable, standardized, and predictable. Rules-based and high-volume processes involving many FTEs are apt for RPA automation. There are several other considerations that leaders need to consider such as: will there be a direct impact on cost savings, the impact of the process on an enterprise-wide effort, are there any major upcoming changes to the process, etc.

“Shortlist the most suitable vendors”:

Leaders need to evaluate various aspects carefully while selecting the vendor for their automation projects. Gartner views the following as essential for successful RPA programs:

• Automation development capabilities
• Integration features
• Control panel/dashboard
• Enterprise IT software development life cycle capabilities
• Hosting and cloud capabilities
• Security, compliance and governance capabilities
• Artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing capabilities
• Optical character recognition (OCR), process discovery and intelligent document processing (IDP)

Rather than just reacting to vendors’ positioning of the scenarios most promising to their solutions, leaders should proactively assess vendor’s offerings using the capabilities and features listed above for their specific requirements and needs.

At Nividous we focus on a holistic approach towards automation, enabling our customers to enjoy a unique competitive edge. The Nividous intelligent automation platform has most of the above-listed capabilities available natively.

“Test-drive shortlisted vendors’ products”:

Run a Proof-of-Concept (POC) for a less complex but high-volume process to test-drive shortlisted vendors’ products. It is advisable to create an agenda and a list of desired outcomes to effectively evaluate and compare vendors’ products.

Gartner also recommends to “Invite stakeholders from each key business area to review the POC. At minimum, this review should cover the business overview portions of the POC. This will enable them to understand how the new RPA technology will work and benefit the organization.”

If you want to learn more in detail about these three steps, you can get the Gartner report, “3 Steps to Start Your RPA Journey”, for free here.

Nividous’ Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Implementation Model to help you expedite your automation journey.

Several RPA implementation challenges can increase the overall RPA program roll-out time by 50 to 60 percent. It is also not uncommon for long-term maintenance and support costs for a growing RPA program to substantially minimize or even erase early gains delivered by the program.

Nividous offers a unique quick start engagement model to help you overcome prevalent RPA implementation challenges and expedite quick adoption of RPA. It guarantees a successful roll-out of a trained Nividous Bot in production in just 3-4 weeks. The model is designed to assure a speedy and successful roll-out that supports long-term sustainability.

We start with a workshop to help you identify the best process to start with. We then analyze the selected process to ensure that it is adequately optimized. This step of process re-engineering helps to maximize the impact of the project and delivers the most value. Then, within a week, we build a well-thought-out business case, document the process, and establish a project. With an agile methodology, we gather feedback from relevant stakeholders and deploy the complete solution to production in 3-4 weeks.

The impact of the automation is clear to business users that can easily compare the time and effort required to accomplish the task previously, to the time that it takes for the Bot to complete the task.

If you are interested to learn more about the Nividous platform or the quick start guarantee, reach out to us at [email protected].