Perform Your Own RPA Maturity Assessment

Where Are You in Your Automation Journey?

It’s one thing to implement automation into your processes, but another entirely to do it with a purpose. IA is about strategy more than throwing technology to the wall and seeing what sticks.

With a tried-and-true operating model to guide your automation journey, you’ll have an easier time discovering new opportunities, optimizing ongoing processes and streamlining your workflows.

The SS&C | Blue Prism® Robotic Operating Model (ROM™2) guides organizations through five steps of digital transformation: strategy, workforce, design, development and operations. With that is our automation maturity model, which measures where you are on your automation journey.

What Is RPA Maturity?

IA or RPA maturity is a way for organizations to assess the progress of their automation across all their systems, identifying successes and areas for improvement. It allows you to determine your point-in-time readiness at every step of your automation journey.

What Are the Stages of RPA Maturity?

These are the five maturity levels we’ve identified:

1. Aware: Here you’re seeing small efficiency gains from your automation program and streamlining your workflows using internal tools and capabilities.
2. Active: Now you’re delivering continuous improvement through your IA or RPA and using it to enhance your customer and employee experiences.
3. Operational: You’re embedding automation programs into the culture of your business and at every level to achieve further efficiencies.
4. Thriving: At this point, you’ve scaled your automation to redesigning and reengineering customer and employee journeys.
5. Visionary: In this last stage, your IA is enabling total digital transformation and redefining how your organization operates.

Within our five maturity levels are the types of digital maturity you could achieve at each stage:

• Efficiency: Seeing automation as a tool and wondering how you can prepare for automation.
• Enrichment: Seeing automation as a capability and wondering what you can do differently with automation.
• Reinvention: Seeing automation as transformative and wondering how you can evolve your journey long-term.

The automation journey, like these stages, is anything but linear; it’s a continuous cycle of learning, improving and optimizing. For example, you could start with automating invoice processing and then expand to procure to pay and augment business decisions.

RPA maturity assessment

Now that you know the stages, how do you identify your automation level of maturity? We’ve broken it down into pockets for each stage of implementation, categorizing your maturity level based on your operation, automation and technology.

• Operation: This is what your automation capability looks like within your organization, including how established your automation team is and how you’re delivering your automations. This can include setting up a Center of Excellence (CoE) team to ensure governance and structure to your automation initiatives.
• Automation: In this pocket, we look at what type of automation you’re delivering, your long-term delivery goals and your future transformation plans. The automation levels could range from basic process improvement and workflow management to advanced process redesigns with an automation-first approach.
• Technology: Here’s where you look at what technology architecture you’re using and any planned changes in your technology footprint. Within the technology sphere is a broad range, which we’ve listed in the next section.

IA/RPA maturity isn’t about one stage of planning or one type of tool or software; it’s more apt to call it an ‘automation maturity model’. Within the maturity model is an entire ecosystem of people, plans and technologies interacting. The maturity assessment will help you pinpoint where you are and how you can continue on your advancement journey.

Types of automation technologies

We’ve listed some automation technologies from basic to advanced:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that mimics human actions to automate manual tasks.
• Optical character recognition (OCR) converts images and handwritten text into machine-readable data.
• Business process management (BPM) orchestrates, oversees and automates workflows.
• Intelligent automation (IA) combines RPA, BPM and AI together to automate end-to-end manual processes.
• Application programming interface (API) connects software so two applications can communicate.
• Low-code or no-code development is an environment for developing applications with little to no coding required.
• Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate human conversation.
• Intelligent document processing (IDP) converts unstructured and semi-structured data into a usable format.
• Natural language processing (NLP) synthesizes natural human speech.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) mimics human cognitive thinking.
• Machine learning (ML) mimics human cognitive learning.
• Deep learning exists within ML and uses multiple layers of processing data.
• Generative AI (gen AI) generates new content based on a variety of inputs.

Your organization may use only one or a few of these technologies. A trusted automation software vendor can help you select the right tools and technology to take you to the next level of your enterprise automation journey.

So, let’s ask that same question again: where are you on your automation journey? You might be able to answer it a little better now.

Where Am I?

There are nuances to each stage within the IA/RPA maturity model. The purpose of these assessments is to move you through your journey of maturity at a pace and style that suits your organization’s goals and your business unit’s capabilities.

To determine where your organization’s automation maturity is, contact SS&C Blue Prism today.

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.