How To Create an RPA Strategy

What Is an RPA Strategy?

Having an RPA strategy is critical for an organization looking to implement automation software. Without it, your people won’t know what to automate and you certainly won’t achieve your desired return on investment (ROI) in the long term. But if implemented correctly, RPA can get you better cost savings and efficiency gains, and make your employees and customers happier.

RPA Strategy Framework

To develop an RPA strategy, you need to survey your operational landscape to identify key areas where RPA could make the most impact. From there, you can team up with skilled engineers, analysts and strategists to craft a comprehensive RPA roadmap that will help your organization grow. Once you have an action plan in place, you can start the training and preparation.

Here’s how you can break down your RPA strategy.

5 key components of an RPA strategy

Target the right processes

To start your strategic RPA roadmap, find those tasks best suited for automation. These tend to be rule-based, time-consuming, repetitive tasks that your people shouldn’t have to do. By utilizing technology like process discovery, you can speed up the time it takes to identify these prime candidates for automation so you can benefit from RPA sooner.

Gain buy-in across the organization

Here’s where you want to develop an RPA business case. This will help you define your RPA strategy, provide important details for your investors and establish a timeline with clear roles, goals and responsibilities.

Find someone in the business to act as an RPA champion, helping get buy-in for the technology from across the business. This person is your herald, crowdsourcing automation ideas from teams and getting people excited about what this tech can do to improve their lives.

Involve IT and business users

Find out what RPA tools are best suited to your existing systems and applications. Your IT team can help you identify the best software while your business users can help you find business processes that could use optimization.

By looking for automation tools with no-code, drag-and-drop features, you can empower your non-tech people to build RPA bots too, helping relieve your IT department from every stage of your automation’s development.

Establish good governance practices

At this stage of your RPA implementation, consider electing an RPA Center of Excellence (CoE), which is a group of people within your business whose role is to ensure governance for your RPA program. They ensure a consistent, standard approach to your RPA solution.

Set up a change management program

As RPA programs expand, people will notice big changes in their day-to-day work. It’s important to communicate these changes openly, helping your human employees adjust and work with RPA bots as their digital coworkers, rather than a rival. The goal of RPA is to improve work by reducing the boring, tedious tasks from their workflow.

Monitor, maintain and scale

Once you’ve deployed your RPA, continuously monitor it to ensure consistency and accuracy. You can also sand out any rough spots in your automated processes and discover new ways to optimize and scale your automation. When you feel comfortable with how your RPA bots are running, you may consider evolving your software robots with intelligent automation (IA).

Intelligent automation combines RPA with artificial intelligence (AI) and business process management (BPM) to automate end-to-end business functions and streamline complex workflows.

What is an example of an RPA strategy?

We’ve walked you through some key strategies to include in your plans. Now, let’s look at a hypothetical checklist for an organization aiming to streamline their customer onboarding process with RPA. Their goal is to improve efficiency, reduce errors and enhance customer experience.

	Strategy	Specifics
✔	Conduct a comprehensive analysis of the current customer onboarding process.	Identify: Bottlenecks Repetitive tasks Areas for improvement
✔	Engage stakeholders from various departments to gather insights and requirements.	Reach out to: IT Operations Customer service
✔	Prioritize processes within the customer onboarding journey.	Find processes that are: Repetitive Rule-based Prone to human error
✔	Evaluate and select an RPA platform that aligns with your business requirements.	Consider factors like: Scalability Ease of integration Security Compliance
✔	Implement automation gradually and scale as you go.	Start with processes that are: Low risk Low complexity
✔	Provide comprehensive training to employees and foster a culture of continuous process improvement.	Train employees on the: Benefits of automation Concerns and misconceptions Collaboration opportunities
✔	Test your software robots in a safe testing environment.	Check for: Errors Inconsistencies Slowdowns
✔	Roll out RPA bots into your production environment and closely monitor their performance.	As your bots run, address: Issues or errors Bottlenecks Optimization opportunities
✔	Establish governance mechanisms for managing and maintaining your RPA bots.	Include plans for: Version control Change management Compliance auditing
✔	Regularly review and optimize automated processes.	Review: Performance metrics Stakeholder feedback Changes in business requirements
✔	Explore advanced RPA capabilities as you grow and scale.	Consider: IA Natural language processing (NLP) Machine learning (ML) Optical character recognition (OCR) Generative AI

What Is the Benefit of Developing an RPA Strategy?

As your RPA capabilities grow, you’ll see a digital transformation in your organization. People once bogged down by manual tasks can now operate with newfound efficiency. Supply lines can run smoothly, administrative burdens can be lifted and decision-making can be accelerated – all thanks to the power of automation.

With the right RPA strategy, you can go forth with confidence that your automation will create a better organization for all.

Alexis Veenendaal is an Associate Content Writer and Editor at SS&C Blue Prism. She’ll tell you all the cool tips and tricks for implementing intelligent automation into your workplace. She has lived and worked internationally as a professional writer and designer for nearly a decade after graduating from the University of Lethbridge for English Literature. Her personal pursuits include authoring books and digital cartography.