#59 The Cloud RPA Checklist Episode: What you should look for when buying a RPA platform

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yes, in today's episode we are looking at the topic RPA, Robotic Process Automation, again, and we thought we will cover sort of a few really important points and and they could, could be a checklist for everyone who is interested in RPA. Yeah, of course. Today's robotic process automation platforms deliver intelligent automation that does more than just automating repetitive tasks. So software, RPA software solution constantly learns and performs nowadays increasingly complex decision-making. And if you're already using intelligent automation in your business, you are enjoying, I would say, lots of business benefits it brings, and it will— and will want opportunities to extract more value from the platform. One of the advantages of rolling out more intelligent automation is that it doesn't need to be a long IT project every time. So when you're looking, looking really for, for getting started and looking for cloud provider in, in that intelligent automation space, so line of business leaders and groups within the center of excellence will, yeah, will work with the IT and procurement department ensuring that that solution works for, for all of them. And And that's, that's why we, we thought a quick checklist, a buyer's checklist for all of these areas for the center of excellence, line of business leaders, and IT stakeholders would be really good to cover today. And yeah, I think let's, let's kick off with our first section. Arno, do you want to cover what the center of excellence should look for in a cloud intelligent automation? Solution?

Yeah, that's right. So agility is the first thing we should look out for, Sascha. Business agility is obviously vital to respond to changes and, you know, keep ahead of your competition. And your intelligent automation solution should let you, you know, edit the processes and add new ones very quickly. It should be very easy to see for example, the performance increase in data processing. You also need to know that the business can scale quickly without incurring compliancy risk, for example. So good visibility of your business processes will obviously reduce this risk. Agility also comes from, I guess, empowering business users to be directly involved in intelligent automation initiatives. So, you know, they can identify and action the automation required without the need, you know, for a major IT project. So with little or no training, these line of business leaders must be able to quickly get up to speed with intelligent automation through simple and intuitive interfaces. So that's kind of like the agility part of it. Reputation is a big one as well. You know, in a fairly young sort of technology sector with many new and emerging players coming out, it's really important to invest in a partnership with a service provider, you know, that will go the distance. You know, our advice is to look for well-established secure providers. And of course, one way to identify likely candidates is to you know, check out the suppliers on the analyst reports such as IDC, Gartner, you know, and you usually want to look out for the top quadrants in those reports, you know, for sort of the industry leaders. Also talk to current users and partners. Again, Gartner's Magic Quadrant report, for example, mentions, you know, the partner and the the customer ecosystems, you know, so those are all kind of really important factors. The third one is really support. So what we want to do is functionality and availability are key attributes for an effective intelligent automation solution. Obviously, you know, if you look at RPA, for example, and some AI modules that integrate with the RPA, so cloud delivery goes a very long way in providing reassurance on those points because upgrade supports and security are sort of baked into the platform. So, you know, you really want to look beyond that, ensuring that there's a strong alignment between the people and the systems in the business and the cloud provider. You know, obviously defining roles and responsibilities is important from the start. And then also we want to look at future potential. So if you are keen to automate certain processes, time to value is really important. And then at the same time, you need to assess growth potential. You know, you want to select a vendor that's got a great functional capability now on their platform while, you know, they also should be investing in future enhancements. And, you know, look at their sort of roadmap their product, their willingness to reevaluate and change direction where needed.

Awesome, thank you. Yeah, and then the next section we have is what IT leaders should look out for in a cloud intelligent automation platform. So when it comes to those platforms, security is one of the number one concerns. Especially cloud-based stuff, it's a number one topic indeed. And especially when you put business-critical processes and data really outside of your corporate network. So there must be really rock-solid certainty that the cloud platform is safe and secure, so enterprise-grade security. And you will need to work with with the cloud provider, with the Intelligent Automation cloud provider, to secure connectivity in full compliance with the business, with the compliance requirements really. And yeah, the next one is around fast deployment. If you're already using Intelligent Automation solutions, I mentioned that earlier, you're already benefiting from lots of good stuff. Fast deployments of new process automation. But cloud solutions accelerate that further and provide newcomers to intelligent automation with a fast track to adoption. And yeah, when it comes to, to, to the cloud intelligent automation. Yeah, that lets you start to automate business process pretty much instantly, instantly, and demand less effort to set up and manage and maintain these environments. Of course, before, when it's not in the cloud, we have to set up all the machines ourselves. But yeah, and when it's already ready there, then we don't have to do that anymore. So you can move really at the speed with very limited technical resources and scale up very quickly when things change. And the IT leaders must work alongside these cloud providers to deploy and maintain all these digital workers, bots effectively in the cloud. So it's a good idea to define exactly these responsibilities from the get-go. So, and then the next one you should check out is the connectivity and integration capabilities. So in the business, for example, as a CIO, you're responsible for connecting the business to these cloud solutions and making sure they are really, really good connections in place. Pre-configured cloud deployment and digital workers that stand really ready to carry out as many processes goes a long way. To reducing the in-house IT workload. So as we know, everyone is completely worked up already. There's a shortage of staff. So that should be really one big focus point when you select a new vendor.

Yeah, so that's good advice for IT leaders out there. So I guess the remaining one is what line of business leaders should look for in a cloud intelligent automation platform. And lines of business leaders are, you know, service delivery managers, you know, people that look after the business. And I guess the first and most important one, in my opinion, is they want to look for measurable business performance improvement. So again, if you're a line of business leader, you probably have a very clear idea about which processes will benefit from automation and digital workers that can handle financial transactions or customer communications, for example, can work around the clock, you know, 24/7, and obviously free up human operators to carry out tasks that add value, you know, to your customer relationship, for example. So measuring cost efficiency for this use case is quite straightforward. However, if you look at sort of intelligent automation-powered business performance improvements, it goes beyond achieving just hard cost efficiency, what we call hard benefits. You know, you'll see a very fast return on investment, not just from full-time equivalent savings, but also in the shape of key performance indicators, such as customer service, customer retention. And, you know, more efficient processes will enhance customer satisfaction, and you will also stand out from your competitors. And, you know, this will drive your customer satisfaction statistics in the right direction. So we're talking about NPA scores and satisfaction ratings. And, you know, ultimately, that would lead to higher sales and better profits, lower cost of business. So I guess the return on an intelligent automation investment will flow very quickly from several directions, you know, from high availability and uptime to reduce risk of downtime and security breaches. You'll also benefit from, you know, being able to operate 24/7 and allocate more digital workers very quickly to a particular process to meet increased demand. So it is sort of looking for that, how can I measure this improvement? The other one is we're looking as a line of business leader for high business impact. And again, you know, we talk about intelligent automation processes and, you know, they really go beyond automating just routine processes. You know, it really offers real potential for proper deep business transformation these days. So again, you'll be able to think beyond automating just your existing processes and dream up really innovative, intelligent processes that can deliver high growth or even disrupt the market, you know, leaving some of your rivals to play catch-up with you. And I think that the right intelligent automation cloud solutions, you know, it really offers you an opportunity to deliver high business impact. And again, one way to identify this potential is to review, you know, the artificial intelligence and machine learning features, for example, of these solutions, you know, as well as the availability of, you know, preconfigured digital workers, for example. So again, high impact, that's what we look for. So it's a, you know, you can understand from a line of business perspective, they are interested in these benefits. I guess, you know, you touched on the IT leader a bit and we looked at the sort of what we're looking for, a center of excellence. So it is gonna be different kind of different stakeholders in this. So, you know, hopefully this discussion would appeal to somebody in one of those personas that's out there looking for intelligent automation and, you know, what to look out for, you know, when you look for a platform Yeah, so that because the market is moving fast, isn't it?

It really makes sense to, when you're starting to evaluate again. So some players, as we mentioned, they are always rated highly in the quadrants, but there are some movements with maybe smaller players, or we definitely know without sort of recommending one specifically, but we have seen Microsoft, for example, going from hardly mentioned anywhere to become really a big leader. So this kind of movements are happening all the time, and depending on what specific use cases need to be implemented, the one player in the market is better than the other. But with that checklist, hopefully, yeah, we can help you to make the right decisions. And yes, always reach out to Arno and myself if you have any questions or like to know more. We have plenty of episodes recorded on the topic of RPA and also on other topics related to process and automation, intelligent automation, process mining, really, really everything. So it's really useful to listen back to our previous episodes. Yeah, otherwise, if you like to stay in touch with us, visit us on theautomationguys.net and subscribe to our newsletter. And yeah, we're looking forward to welcoming you on the next episode. And until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again. With this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!