There are a number of key things that help make RPA a success. But RPA best practice isn’t just limited to the quality of design of bot or process design. Instead, it’s a host of other, often non-technical factors, that contribute to how successful RPA deployment is in the long term.
Here are our five key RPA best practices that you need to know.
Put Humans On Top
The best RPA services out there recognize the importance of human beings. That means that bots are built to help people – not take away their oversight or overall involvement.
Automation should always help give people back their time, but those people still very much need to deal with outliers, maintain the bots, and look to where further improvements can be made.
Human beings should always be in control, so while it’s great to save them time, it’s important to make sure RPA is being used to add value – and users assert control over the automation that’s in place.
Create A Culture
Effective RPA needs a supportive culture. That culture starts at the top; so if you want RPA to be successful you need buy-in at the most senior level. You could consider starting an RPA committee that brings in stakeholders from each part of your organization.
This would involve a wide range of people and also demonstrate the importance of the technology to other staff. One simple, but very effective RPA best practice, is to name your bots. This is an easy way to make them more familiar and ensure people engage with them more easily.
Standardize Through Governance
Culture is hugely important; but you don’t want everyone in your business trying to develop automation on their own – that will get messy very quickly. Instead, you should establish a clear governance model for your organization’s RPA.
This model will demonstrate the core principles you want to employ, as well as give developers reusable components in their RPA builds – keeping up a level of standardization. Strong governance ensures quality, security, and compliance in all your RPA development.
Become Agile
Agile methodologies were built for tech, so they’re perfect for helping to build, test, and deploy bots. The agile approach is all about breaking down blocks of work into smaller components. By seeing tasks at a more granular level, you can more quickly develop bots to take on that work.
Deploying a bot isn’t the last step though, they need to be monitored for effectiveness and then adjusted to improve performance. Assessing success at a wider scale can be done by evaluating all bots deployed within a specific project or timeframe and this can help to inform further development.
Make Automation Everywhere
There’s no question that RPA can lead to dramatic reductions in costs – particularly stemming from time savings. But to make automation a key part of your business, it needs to be everywhere, and it needs to be seen by everyone.
Making bot development and deployment with low, or no-code tools is a great starting place because it will mean more people have access to the tools to put automation in place.
Want to make automation successful in your business? Contact PAteam today, we’re here to help.