8MARCH 2021Today's office workers spend a lot of time moving between different applications. They often have to reenter or copy and paste the same data ­ such as a customer's name and address details ­ from one application to another to complete a specific task. Such manual work is laborious, time-consuming, and prone to error. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to emulate human users and automate ­ as far as possible ­ these tedious, mundane tasks. Automation improves the user experience for both employees and customers. RPA boosts productivity and can typically free up between 15% and 30% of an employee's time to focus on tasks that deliver greater value to the organization and improve the customer experience. Companies which use SAP Intelligent RPA (RPA platform of SAP) achieve business benefits and show significant ROI (Return on Investment). More details are provided in SAP Intelligent RPA use cases document.Simple and nonintrusive adoption of advanced technology in an employee's day-to-day tasks enhances employee well-being and satisfaction. It can also make an important contribution to a company's change management as it seeks to accelerate its digital transformation. The companies who start their RPA journey face a choice between two types of RPA: Attended and Unattended.Attended means partially automated process, where robots are co-working with humans. Employee shares some part of the process or scenario with robot and usually triggers it by himself.Unattended RPA is a fully automated process, where robots are working autonomously with human supervision only such as monitoring of tasks and review of the results. These robots are usually triggered automatically, either by some event or using a schedule.However, the fact that you are reading this article means you have already done your first steps with RPA. It doesn't matter if you bought licenses, finished your PoC (Proof of Concept) or already have a number of departments in your organization which are taking advantages of this technology ­ you have a question: What is next?Before going to the next steps let's see how the RPA projects look like. Below you could find the typical 12-step roadmap for RPA technology at companies: Once all the steps define a proper and consistent way to leverage this powerful technology, the practice shows that many companies neglect some of the steps or put them in some chaotical order. Also, one of the typical pictures which may be seen is having different approaches inside the companies, for example when finance and procurement departments start these projects separately. Although they implement solution and even succeed in specific conditions, getting their own practices and retrospectives, organizations may suffer due to inconsistency and chaos. Finally, the succeed projects in such setup look like great luck. With a recent survey by EY, finding that 30-50% of initial RPA projects fail to realize their expected returns. Another study conducted by Deloitte says that only three percent of organizations had managed to scale RPA to a level of 50 or more robots. Why does it happen?In fact, failure to achieve expected outcomes from RPA initiatives are most often due to factors outside of the chosen RPA platform. Through the number of failures reasons, the following could be found: Lack of RPA strategy, Insufficient change management, not proper understanding of the automated process, disorganized and siloed implementations and unrealistic expectations. These reasons could be covered separately by paying more attention to them and using some checkbox to support decisions, but the more clear and proper way is to setup a right governance structure and responsibility. And this is the time to announce Centre of Excellence or CoE.Set-up a CoE organisation for SAP Intelligent Robotic Process AutomationPeter Engel, Driving process automation with SAP Intelligent RPAIntroductionCXO INSIGHTS
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