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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging technology designed to automate routine or repetitive organizational tasks, providing greater efficiencies while saving resources and time.
Although it's still a relatively new technology, organizations may encounter certain RPA Challenges during implementation.
Statista research projects that the global RPA market will expand by over 11 billion GBP by 2030 compared to 2020; economic expansion for RPA alone has skyrocketed over ten times that amount since then.
At such unprecedented growth rates, we must acknowledge and address risks and obstacles associated with RPA implementation across actuarial teams and businesses; policies and procedures must be implemented accordingly to mitigate them.
This blog provides insight into the challenges associated with robotic process automation (RPA). It provides solutions that will boost company growth.
Common Challenges In RPA
These difficulties may include organizational, process selection-related technical implementation, and post-deployment issues.
You can view a comprehensive list of RPA challenges and potential solutions below.
Absence Of Responsibility And Unclear Duties
Failing to have an individual within an organization oversee various aspects of an RPA project creates another obstacle to its successful execution.
Such confusion will hinder decision-making processes and result in delays for everyone involved.
Once an RPA solution has been deployed, it is also imperative that staff understand their responsibilities within its context.
Solution:
As part of any project, those responsible must be clearly established, including authorizing designs, overseeing work being completed, and measuring success rates.
Making An Incorrect Business Case Selection
An organization will only realize a marginal benefit by choosing an inadequate business case for automation.
Solution:
Understanding exactly when and what needs automation is paramount when selecting an RPA case. There are two potential avenues you could follow to do just this
- Automating repetitive work that highly skilled employees complete allows them to focus on more critical projects for your company.
- Automating manual tasks to reduce staff costs and streamline hiring is possible using RPA technology.
RPA will make hiring simpler.
As part of your RPA cost projections, take into account every factor. This includes costs such as purchasing the automation tool, infrastructure changes, and maintaining processes.
Lack Of A Defined RPA Plan
Developing a business process automation strategy is paramount to avoid RPA pitfalls. RPA technology may allow individuals and enterprises to implement and scale.
For it to grow effectively over time, it requires creating a solid foundation, such as providing stable IT infrastructures, defined strategies, communication plans, change management programs, and hiring skilled RPA specialists.
Solution:
Every business that employs RPA must first establish a project plan. It would help if you posed yourself the following queries while working through it:
- What goals have been set forth when using RPA in practice, and can their outcomes be quantified?
- When should robotic process automation (RPA) make sense, and when should other technologies be considered?
- RPA may provide long-term or short-term fixes.
- What are our goals concerning growth?
Choosing The Wrong Process
Not every process lends itself well to the automation journey, though not automating ineffective processes is likely to improve things; automating small processes may yield significant savings; Intelligent Automation process Practice explained.
Just because something can be automated doesn't necessarily mean it should. Select RPA candidates carefully if you wish for optimal outcomes.
Solution:
When assessing a process's potential for automation, take into account the following features:
- Process structure: Look out for procedures with predetermined templates that require repeated manual input and follow set standards of behavior.
- Change Frequency: Automating processes that undergo frequent modifications will prove challenging.
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Standardization: Determine whether hiring procedures across departments are similar.
As more differences exist between hiring procedures, automation opportunities costs increase with every variation that appears.
- Execution frequency: How frequently are processes executed? Prioritizing often performed strategies (weekly or daily) over tackling RPA automation challenges for seldom utilized methods is time and money well-spent.
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Process complexity: Automation technology may only sometimes be suitable when tasks require high cognitive demands, like creating advertisement images for ads.
Communicating with clients to gather requirements and then getting final approval before making it easy for marketing specialists; however, automating it would likely prove more expensive and risk not meeting client expectations even with crowdsourced help finding a suitable image.
- Fault tolerance: RPA works better with error-tolerant processes than error-sensitive ones due to bots relying on user experience (UX) data to complete tasks; they do not adjust automatically if this data changes over time, meaning critical processes still can be automated, but their results must still be validated either through other systems or human workers.
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Business Impact: For quick results from your automation efforts, look for processes with high business units impact (i.e., tasks that directly serve customers).
This way, you'll see more immediate returns.
Automation teams must fully grasp each process they select as part of their business processes strategy.
Not Streamlining And Optimizing The Chosen Process Before Automating
Automating processes that aren't optimized ends up wasting your time. People who are used to performing specific tasks a certain way may continue doing them even though that might not be optimal for productivity.
Take this actual process example: an employee receives an email that contains text and numbers; these numbers are crucial.
They required printing the email, binding it in a folder, scanning it again, and then uploading it as a digital image onto the system instead of just getting numbers directly from the email; other employees then used this scanned image instead of just looking up numbers now in the email meaning printing and scanning steps needed to be automated are eliminated in favor of automated procedure.
Solution:
To overcome this RPA challenge, you can find and remove pointless steps from a process, like duplicate approvals, and, if possible, reduce the number of exceptions.
Subject matter experts, RPA developers, business process analysts, and other participants can all perform this task.
Making An Effort To Automate The Procedure Fully
Automation projects may only sometimes be achievable in its entirety. However, automating only 20% can increase costs fivefold, and automating 70%-80% can often be completed quickly with little additional work required.
Are the efforts worth undertaking?
Solution:
Assess whether all or parts of a process need to be automated to resolve an RPA issue; otherwise, determine what tasks may suffice, as RPA solutions and AI technologies might not suffice alone in alleviating human employees from specific studies.
When RPA doesn't suffice alone, AI-powered technology could assist further by taking on the individual duties of human intervention employees that don't lend themselves easily to automation tools alone.
It Needed To Take Advantage Of Trustworthy, Scalable Options Offered In The Market
Pre-built enterprise automation solutions abound on the market. Suppose a dependable tool with all necessary features can already be licensed for licensing.
In that case, there's no reason to start from scratch off-the-shelf RPA automation solutions may even reduce risks by making life simpler.
Solution:
The automation team can determine whether pre-made or custom RPA solutions are most suited for their situation, considering both options based on predefined standards and custom-tailored ones.
It may make sense to utilize off-the-shelf solutions if working in highly regulated sectors with processes consisting of standard features versus legacy systems with complex specifications that cannot be changed quickly and require customized
The Absence Of An Appropriate Infrastructure
Businesses will only reap the full advantages of RPA implementation if they have the proper infrastructure.
Solution:
Consider which capabilities your organization will need post-automation and whether the current infrastructure can accommodate them all to face RPA challenges successfully.
Two elements should make up an ideal infrastructure solution:
- Your system must possess enough power to execute all of your scripts effectively.
- Establishing a failover server will aid in keeping it operational 24/7/365.
- Please verify that your system is centralized, immune to external influences, and that any updates won't compromise it.
Conclusion
Overall, RPA can bring significant advantages to an organization; however, its implementation and subsequent challenges must be successfully navigated to harness these rewards fully.
To fully take advantage of RPA within an organization and fully realize its benefits, it must be successfully deployed while meeting any associated obstacles or hurdles.
