April 2020 – TONY WALKER

New to RPA? Avoid These Top 5 RPA Mistakes

All across the country and from our network in other countries too, we’re observing businesses and teams new to RPA and automation making these same mistakes. Let’s dive straight in to see how these can be easily avoided

1) Lack of senior or business leader buy-in / RPA Strategy

Getting senior buy-in is the only way to get a successful RPA programme moving. During stakeholder engagements it’s vital to get top-down enthusiasm and demonstrate how RPA can enable their senior management teams to be more efficient and cost effective.

If senior management are fully on-board, they can remove blockers, deploy the right personnel to assist the RPA team to attend workshops, identify opportunities, and they can invest their limited funds in more RPA initiatives. If senior leaders believe in the technology, they will be more likely to redirect funds away from ‘tried-and-tested’ methods, such as recruitment or outsourcing, and start investing in this new and seemingly untested (in their area at least) technology.

2) Choosing the wrong process

Time and time again I’ve heard of companies or consulted with companies who were in the midst of trying to automate a complex, low-volume, highly volatile process as one of their first processes. Sometimes the process even requires several forms of AI.

This is a clear sign of “shiny object syndrome” (SOS), the propensity to chase something because it’s new and shiny and everyone else is doing it.

Or perhaps a case of “The one who shouts loudest” gets their process automated. At this point the RPA sponsor or senior needs to step in. New things can have great value, but there must be a logical approach to utilitising such a powerful tool.

Choosing the wrong process to start with is guaranteed to stall an automation programme. Stakeholders will lose interest, the RPA team will get disheartened, and the RPA sponsor will be wondering whether she will ever get a return on the investment and may consider pulling the plug on the whole thing. Such a toxic perception of this tool will swiftly destroy what you are trying to achieve. If you suspect you have started with the wrong process, this realization may mark the last chance you have to hire an experienced RPA analyst or success manager to turn things around and get the process back on track.

If you have just hired an expert and have yet to choose your process, it would be wise to listen to the expert to avoid choosing badly.

3) Lack of time/commitment from SME

Though buy-in from senior leadership gets things moving, the second hurdle is getting the managers and the team themselves excited and keen to get involved. This is potentially the hardest sell, as many may be totally content with the old way of doing things. Some may not feel comfortable with change in general, and the rest may quietly fear that this new technology could change their job or replace them.

Once team managers and SMEs are on board, the right expectations need to be set with them so they understand how much time the RPA team requires from them in order to design the right solution, to the necessary detail. If expectations are not clear upfront, staff and managers may grow frustrated with intermittent disruptions to business as usual. It’s important that they understand how the discovery and implementation process works, and the RPA team needs to clearly layout their method, and explain that it’s not a one-and-done event, but a staged process.

4) Poor stakeholder education and communications

Doing RPA in a dark corner of the office leads to staff thinking the worst. Openness and visibility is best; take them on the journey with you. At a minimum, an easy way to stay visible is to create a newsletter and an online portal with information on the technology, the process and a discussion forum for questions and concerns.

In addition to the visibility provided by open-door policy and regular lunch-and-learns or periodic workshops, the Centre of Excellence should stay in communication with staff. Popping up and disrupting teams for a few days, then disappearing without results can be very irritating. Stakeholders in a few organizations I’ve worked with have expressed their frustrations about previous RPA teams who attempted to implement but were shut down or moved on to a different team without any explanation. Understandably when I came to launch the RPA properly I was initially meet by reservations and reluctance. Even if your RPA team needs to close down an initiative, its courtesy to inform the team as to why, so that the relationship ends on good terms and they are welcoming the next time you circle back.

5) Not streamlining process first

There are two schools of thought in RPA. Roll out automation fast leaving the processes as it is because it will immediately impact the bottom line. Or optimize a process first with lean thinking so that the process is redesigned to be streamlined and is designed for a robot instead of a human. At Lean IA, you can surely guess which one we prefer. Garbage in, garbage out.

Optimising a process can provide a much faster payback period as costs may be lower because the process may be designed to be simpler. Imagine a process where the human goes back and forth to pull data from one application into another. This workflow is long winded as the human has limited memory, whereas the process could be redesigned for the robot to take all the information from the whole page, then paste it into the other page in one go, thus eliminating the old back-and-forth way.

Developer working on code late at night, view from the back

The 5 key mistakes of Automation & AI

…that are causing teams 99 problems to digitally transform

“Transformation is a process, not an event” – John Kotter

If you’ve been involved with change management you most likely would have heard these words – which are from the world-renowned change management and business thought-leader John Kotter, and he’s written several books on the subject such as his New York best seller “Our Iceberg is melting”. The essence of his message and approach to change still runs true in this new digital age

—–RISE OF THE MACHINES ——

With the tech trends of the last few years suddenly accelerated by recent global events – it will become increasingly difficult to direct teams and strategize as the world becomes more digitally reliant, without technological awareness steering the ship.

As technology begins to infiltrate every industry, market sector and every job, CIOs, as a Mckinsey article put it, need to “move from being a functional to a strategic business leader”. If a company does not have a CIO, the non-techie business leaders (no matter the industry) need to become more tech-savvy to navigate in the new technology age to leverage cutting-edge tech and create value.

There are common traps that business leaders who are new to automation technology fall prey to. These surprisingly common pitfalls and mistakes end up causing an array of consequential problems and challenges down the line – so I’d like to address this at the root from which most or all problems and pitfalls stem from

—————– Digital workers, not software ——————

But firstly, robotic process automation (RPA) is functionally quite different to traditional software changes – RPA is strongly business led (mainly by the COO and the operations team). The reason lies in the history of RPA which was designed to put power in the hands of the business and alleviate pressure for the IT department. RPA allowed the business (with expert guidance and support) to implement solutions and navigate technical roadblocks of old legacy systems faster, in a couple weeks or months, rather than waiting on cumbersome technical changes which could take years.

The other difference is that RPA is used in a very new way to other software, because effectively RPA ‘robots’ are virtual workers who do specific menial tasks – repetitive and mundane processes like copy-and-pasting customer data from one system to the next, or processing invoices.

SO, WHAT ACTUALLY IS RPA —————–

RPA is a software platform, alike a virtual worker, that can mimic any menial and repetitive tasks your staff do on their computer, as long as the process has a logic workflow, with rules-based decisions and it doesn’t require human intuition.

So no matter what type of business or industry you are in, if you have staff doing repetitive tasks, this is a waste of their time and intellect, and waste of your money – as an RPA virtual worker, costs one tenth the cost of a full time employee, doesn’t take breaks and can work 24/7,365

Intelligent automation (IA) combines automation tools like RPA with Artificial Intelligence to further enhance the scope of what your virtual workers can do, be that; reading emails, extracting information from scanned invoices or forms, or even replying to customers via a chatbot

This suite of powerful technologies can save vast amounts of time on menial tasks and unlock six, seven or even eight figure financial savings annually from your business, whilst also increasing speed, throughput, accuracy of service and improving compliance and customer and employee satisfaction.

Many business leaders in industries not yet on the forefront of automation do not feel that this is right for their business and this is fair to think this, as vendors have focused mainly on Finance, Manufacturing and Insurance industries. However currently about 50% of businesses have started to use RPA, though it is forecasted that by 2025 97% of all businesses will be taking advantage of this modern technology.

Further exploration on how businesses can get started with automation is covered in another article, however I’d like to draw your attention to one data point:

“50% of all investments in RPA (and AI) fail”

This is a concerning reality I have been investigating for several years now, as almost all businesses in a few short years will be utilizing automation and AI, but only 50% of their projects will succeed – so let’s take a look at common reasons for this

1. Lack of senior business leader tech-awareness

Where senior leadership teams are not fully aware of or can’t articulate what process automation is, it can be difficult for these innovative leaders to get their peers or seniors bought in. Furthermore, it becomes even more of a challenge to fit this into the corporate strategy and develop a roadmap for rolling this out enterprise wide

Leadership teams that have a good and aligned understand of how robotic process automation and artificial intelligence (aka intelligent automation) should be used to transform the business and build centre of excellence teams to govern this will led in their market. Most businesses know that they need automation, AI, a chatbot and other buzz words to modernise, but not every leader truly understands how to leverage these in practice

2. Matching wrong technology to use case

“Easy when you know how”

Choosing the wrong process for RPA or AI is by far the most common mistake we see businesses make in every industry, and it becomes an expensive PROBLEM, both in money, time and patience. Furthermore, it can result in projects being shut down, and then reopened a year later under new management. There’s also the cost of hiring external consultants to fix the issues and help teams unlearn bad habits – as well as re-gaining commitment from frustrated stakeholders

Identifying automation suitable processes is really quite straightforward when you have a tried and tested method for identifying, assessing and implementing processes. Having a data-backed approach and mechanism is a logical challenge against certain politics and influences and ‘teams who shouts the loudest’. It’s a challenge I’ve come up against many times however by using business data and a scientific approach, it was much easier to persuade stakeholders on the best course of action

3. Poor stakeholder education and communications

“Your most valuable assets – your staff”

Implementing process automation to save hours and days of menial tasks from your employees working lives may sounds good financially, but actually can sound very daunting to employees, as it can stinks of replacement and redundancy. Poor (or lack of) communication from the business is the reason for what is by far the biggest cause of RPA and AI project failure and delays – staff resistance to change

Staff need to be empowered with the know-how and the understanding that technology as always is here to augment our work so we are more productive. Teams need to be shown that the benefits of automation means less late nights trying to meet deadline, better job satisfaction due to doing more creative and human-to-human work instead of tedious, repetitive, mind-numbing tasks.

Granted, it would be naïve to believe that no staff member will become redundant or lose their jobs. As an analyst for many years, I have repeatedly heard that analyst roles were most likely to go as they were highly logic and methodical– perfect for automation

However, for societies and businesses to advance, old jobs (just like old business models) that no longer work will need to be modified/evolve to those that do. And having a training plan for employees serves everyone two fold.

1 – employees are upskilled and trained to do their job in a new way or do newly created jobs, or staff are re-deployed into different teams that are growing

2 – employees leave companies and enter the marketplace newly skilled to be repositioned into a faster growing industry

4. Lack of time and commitment from SMEs

“Making automation a corporate priority”

Stakeholders of RPA projects generally have unrealistic expectations as they believe implementing automation is a lot faster and simpler – but unless they’ve been made aware, they wouldn’t know what actually goes into automating a process.

Process owners and subject matter experts are who automation teams interact with the most to identify the problems, design, build and test the solutions. As they play such a central role it’s imperative that they and especially their managers understand at a high level the general process for delivering automation, as the project will literally live or die with them. They hold the knowledge of the process, the have the access to the process data.

What I’ve witnessed and heard from peers is that team managers (either un-informed or resistant to change) will dedicate an hour or two of one or two SMEs initially but then re-deploy them back into Business-as-usual work and have limited availability and put it as low priority going forward – again RPA is a fairly new concept and stakeholders must be shown that these changes is a process, not an event

5. Not streamlining process first

“Garbage in, garbage out”

There seem to be two schools of thought in RPA. Roll out automation quickly, leaving the processes as it is. This immediately positively impacts the bottom line with financial savings. However, re-engineering a process to optimise it first doesn’t speed up a bad system (which could put immense strain on bottleneck or result in an unstable robot), but provides a better return on investment and gives you a more robust bot due to a simpler process

Lean thinking is a great combination to RPA and AI, as many companies are starting to form Lean teams in tandem with their RPA team.

These 5 key mistakes cause hundreds of problems and can be boiled down to these 3

Businesses failed to transform their automation plan because:

1. They didn’t know how to get started and couldn’t build momentum

2. They had technology skills gaps throughout their core and stakeholder teams

3. They didn’t have a clear plan which showed how automation would be rolled out or how help achieve various corporate objectives

Problem 1: Can’t start, No momentum:

Why couldn’t teams get started? Because they didn’t create a repeatable formula

Why didn’t create a repeatable formula? Because they didn’t have a tried and tested framework to use

Problem 2: Technology Skills gaps:

Why did these companies have skills gaps? Because they didn’t educate their core delivery team and stakeholder teams uniformly.

Why didn’t they educate their team? Because they didn’t have a comprehensive training plan

Problem 3: No Plan, Can’t scale.

Why didn’t they have a clear enterprise plan for RPA? Because they didn’t have an automation strategy

Why didn’t they have a strategy? Because they didn’t have a scientific approach to build a data-backed automation strategy

We believe that in this new age, business leaders who empower their workforce to augment themselves and keep discovering new technology will achieve full digital transformation. Our training package is developing automation professionals to solve their team’s root causes and overcome common problems.

HR: Working alongside your digital workforce

Did you know, implementing process automation is a lot closer to onboarding new staff than deploying an IT systems upgrade?

Tasks for on-boarding a robot/digital worker:

· Setting up user IDs and credentials

· Assigning the correct access and authority levels

· ‘Training’ on the process and business rules

· Assigning a manager for each automated process

· Telling robots whom to notify of any issues

· Monitoring performance and escalating concerns

“By 2025 97% of businesses will be using robotic process automation (RPA)”

With the majority of businesses on-boarding new digital workers in just a few short years, how staff should work alongside ‘robots’ may become the number one question for HR and management. IT and operations teams have been the main focus for assisting with the adoption of automation, but, as mentioned in our book Business @ the Speed of Bots, HR has been neglected …but should this now be the focus?

Staff, no matter if they have a technical or non-technical role will feel nervous with the thought of having digital colleagues. However, HR needs to work closely with the Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) team to ease anxieties felt company-wide and be a key player in showing staff how to embrace digital transformation for their own benefit, creating a culture shift.

If you’re not too familiar with RPA, it’s a powerful and versatile tool to automate monotonous and repetitive tasks, so that staff teams can become more productive by spending more time working on value-added tasks. But have you ever wondered why 50% of RPA and AI projects fail, and why less than 5% of businesses succeeded to scale this capability?

– one theory suggested that building the technology isn’t the issue, the struggle lies in educating the business on new technology so that they can effectively lead this initiative, instead of resisting it

RPA presents many new challenges for HR:

· Helping to source the right experts to develop teams in house

· Addressing concerns of employees who view RPA as scary robots, rather than enablement tools

· A new method of automating monotonous tasks vs the old way of outsourcing these overseas

· Creating and revising job descriptions and providing new training

· Restructuring progression paths as new positions and new business services are created as a result of automation.

Developing in-house vs outsourcing automation?

Up until now, businesses have turned to vendors for guidance, however, RPA and AI software vendors specialise in how to build automation and design architecture, however, it is the consultancies that specialise in working with clients to get value from it. Maybe what is missing is a transfer of knowledge to empower staff teams to support the roll-out of the technology.

For example, an accountant wouldn’t ask their preferred spreadsheet provider how to get the most out of the technology. With the correct guidance and understanding from a spreadsheet expert, the accountant would be best placed to answer that question themself

Scary robots or powerful enablement tools?

If you’ve not seen that powerful film Hidden Figures, it’s about ‘the Computers’ (a team of female mathematicians that worked at NASA to manually do research, analysis and testing). When they had recently discovered that Nasa had bought the IBM 7090, the character Dorothy Vaughan said:

“Oh, it’ll run eventually, and when it does, we have to know how to program it.”

This quote really stood out for me as it seems quite apt for this new digital age. Developing and empowering staff to better understand how to use and work with these new technologies is key for a business to transform.

A study mentioned in Business Wire showed that 70% of businesses believe RPA allows employees to have more human interaction. Keeping employees engaged, productive and happy at work is to succeed at digital transformation. The study also mentioned how 60% said RPA helps people focus on more meaningful, strategic tasks. Yet another survey carried out by TechnoJobs shows that 43% of those questioned expected that over the next 24 months, they expect automation to have the greatest impact on customer service and order-processing functions

Managing teams augmented with the Automation.

Just like when working with colleagues, staff teams need to understand how to communicate with digital workers, and managers will need to know how to manage their digital workforce.

Staff will need to know:

o How work should be assigned to robots or passed on to robots to complete a process

o When robots have finished the tasks or whether the robots completed the work correctly or not

o How to track performance of robots and who the robots should report issues and errors too

o What new targets need to be set for teams, now that they are faster, more productive and are outperforming their previous targets

New roles that intelligent automation (IA) will create.

Automation will inevitably change the structure and responsibilities of all of our roles, be that if you’re working in an operations team or even if you work in the automation team itself. High volume, monotonous and repetitive tasks will be handed over to digital workers and most likely replaced with newer more intellectual, and subjective tasks. Be that more human-to-human tasks, like problem-solving, research and analysis, or customer service tasks.

New automation-related jobs or responsibilities will inevitably emerge such as roles that monitor digital co-worker performance, assess new opportunities for process improvement, or even migrating existing Analysts, Project Managers, or technical staff into the businesses core RPA/Automation team

“Digital transformation is human at heart “

These are the words of a sticker that I have on my laptop, and it’s a truth that I’m reminded of every time I sit at my desk. Automation isn’t an IT or Change team thing, it’s an anyone thing – It’s business-led, supported by IT, guided by the Centre of Excellence, but the solutions are designed (and owned) by the staff teams

One of the most sobering statistics that I’ve seen in most recent years regarding technology trends was in a McKinsey Global Institute report, which estimated that by 2030, automation will drive 75 to 375 million people to reskill and even change occupation. To look at this another way, the RPA job market will be flooded with ‘new blood’ looking to get into the RPA/automation field. This massive influx of inexperienced RPA staff could push the RPA failure rate above its current 50% mark.

It might be worthwhile to keep your existing staff who have the experience and knowledge of your clients and processes, along with existing relationships with your staff and train them in RPA delivery. With a little help from expert boutique consultancies to mentor and guide your in-house team to execute RPA projects successfully, your company can quickly become self-reliant and quite possibly more successful than fully outsourcing your Centre of Excellence indefinitely.

Where to go from here? Apply ‘AEIO YOU’ to your business:

· Awareness should start at the top, and so should alignment. Digital transformation works best in organisations where seniors stakeholders are all bought in and aligned on how best to use the technology

· Businesses that educate and empower their staff in identifying the right use cases for the array of intelligent automation technologies are able to find opportunities quickly and scale faster

· A business that has a logical, data-backed method will identify high ROI opportunities and by involving staff in the ideation stage will make it easier for staff to work alongside robots once they are launched

· Businesses should build automation solutions on a lean and optimised process, using the best practices of their chosen providers, where that’s RPA, intelligent automation or a new form of AI

· Measuring results is vital, RPA projects should yield financial and non-financial results that benefit staff (and of course the business and the customers). Perhaps there was enhanced staff satisfaction from fewer late nights, a morale boost from a high Net Promoter Score due to faster service and fewer errors, or less management pressure as a result of achieving ambitious objectives.

· A company that has an organised automation team and clear control and oversight of the digital workforce will ensure benefits are maintained

· And a company that continually uncovered newer technologies to enhance their existing automated solutions, and upskills their staff, will inevitably achieve full digital transformation

Like and subscribe to my YouTube channel Tony IA (Intelligent Automation, Simplified) for videos created to simplify intelligent automation for business leaders and professionals who are new to automation to level-up your knowledge. Become empowered on how you optimise your business and discover new technologies, in a lean and accelerate way. You can also learn more from my book, Business @ the Speed of Bots: The AEIO YOU method HOW TO IMPLEMENT ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION THAT SCALES. Get ready for the new digital transformation age for more information. The foreword is written by Guy Kirkwood, who is the Chief Evangelist at UiPath, and a very well-known advocate of RPA with over 20 years of experience in outsourcing.

What is Intelligent Automation (IA)?

Digital transformation in the workplace is being hailed as the fourth industrial revolution, and changing how business add value,. So embracing it now could be the key to success for your business. You may have heard key terms such as Intelligent Automation (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which is the backbone of digital transformation, but if you are unsure of how they could impact your career, do not worry these concepts are not as complex as they sound, and we will break them down into simpler terms for your understanding. With change comes uncertainty, and a natural fear of job loss, but at the same time there is also ample opportunity in leveraging IA and RPA to enhance and develop your career. It’s a lot easier than you think, read on to learn more.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

In simple terms, RPA is low-code software that can be programmed to record a simple process and then can repeat that process over and over again. RPA is the number one, fastest growing technology in the digital transformation space. If used correctly it can be implemented to save time and money.

How can RPA be put into practice?

Simple, for example if you use a macro on excel, you can record a few steps of the process you follow and then press play to see that same process run in a loop until it’s completed the list of items you’ve set. You can even edit the underlying code or build the process from scratch; the RPA process is pretty much this but faster and more sophisticated. As long as the steps are logical, and do not require intuition or judgement, RPA can be used on any combination of desktop applications, web applications and websites, the options are limitless.

RPA is more similar to an automated person than a piece of software as it uses the user interface just like you and I would, by clicking on things like buttons and links, and typing as if it was using the keyboard. It’s almost like training a new hire to conduct specific repetitive tasks such as:

· Copy and pasting data from one system to the next.

· Entering data into an application from a spreadsheet.

· Updating financial information from an invoice.

These are just some examples of what can be done with Robotic Process Automation. It’s almost like outsourcing simpler tasks to a virtual assistant that will save you time and allow you to focus on more complex tasks which require your input and decision making, the more creative work.

Where did RPA come from?

The concept of RPA (the use of macros, screen-scrapping and recording) has been around since the 90’s, however a software company called Blue Prism launched a more user-friendly product called “Automate” in 2003.

When talking about Blue Prism shaping IA today, the SVP of Blue Prism Danny Major has said, “Intelligent automation is fundamentally changing how businesses reimagine ways of working with a unified workforce, digital first, people enriched. We’re ready to assist business leaders by bringing our understanding of intelligent automation tools and giving them the capabilities and insight they need to help it become the foundational operating system in the enterprise.”

This is when RPA began to gain popularity, it came about for two reasons:

· When overseas labour costs were rising, and businesses needed to reduce costs.

· Companies became overly data hungry and demanded more tech to keep up with rising customer demands for faster services, more ways to purchase things, and improved customer service and experiences.

In reality it was difficult for tech departments to keep up with the demands, this is when RPA become a faster solution to solve technical issues in a matter of months or even weeks.

Process automation can be seen as the backbone of digital transformation to modern businesses with slow process and clunky ancient applications, or make even fairly modern business operate a lot faster and smoother by:

· Reducing queues

· Reducing errors

· Save time on simple tasks so staff can spend more time on customer service

· A better understanding of what was going on in the backend of the business

· Achieving a better work life balance and a better user experience

How can you outline an RPA process?

If you can draw out each step of a process and a simple guide on how each decision can be made (without human input) then this process could be automated by a robot. A simple example would be:

1. Click on Google Chrome icon

2. Type Yahoo Finance web address

3. Type stock name on excel (APPL)

4. Then you can create decision:

a. If price is down – click buy

b. If price up – click sell

5. Close down Google Chrome

Will bots replace us and take our jobs?

No one wants to feel like their job may be at risk, but with the development of new technology there will always understandably be a fear of job loss. Those who do not fully understand RPA and AI may also feel this way, but if you examine the possible implementations of this technology, you will quickly come to realise that it should be celebrated and not feared. The aim of PRA is to reduce the amount of time spent on mundane, repetitive tasks to free up time for more intellectually stimulating and satisfying work, leading to a more purposeful role, ‘Automation should take the robot out of the human’.

Despite the scare mongering online, AI is miles away from being smart enough to replace humans and new technologies tend to create more jobs (look at personal computers, internet, mobile phones). They create new industries, new jobs, or new ways of working. It is an evolution, and there will of course be jobs that are replaced, but smart companies are upskilling staff on how to use automation to do more. We often see the loss of knowledge and skillsets when staff leave the company, and new staff have to be trained to replace them, but some of this may now be automated. Automation typically opens new avenues to meet customer needs and allows us to focus more on interesting and creative work. The real value of a business is and always will be in its staff.

How can I learn more about RPA?

Automation and AI has helped to significantly improve our lives over the past few years in ways you might not even realise, from saving us time to narrowing down the number of choices we have to suit our personal characteristics. The algorithms used for Siri, Alexa, and Uber are all based on AI, and even the algorithm on Netflix which suggests recommendations of what to watch next, that saves us hours of time scrolling to find something we’d like to watch. There are many ways you can use PRA and IA to improve your business too, and it’s not as difficult as you may think.

Monthly Archives: April 2020