#61 The Automation guys on How to start your RPA journey

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yeah, as always, I'm here together with Arno, and today we will talk about one of our favorite topics, RPA. And yeah, For many of our listeners, RPA is still quite new and more and more of you are starting right now and like to get the most out of robotic process automation. And that's why we are sharing more on that today and more specifically on how to start your RPA journey and make sure you wind up in a great place. So yeah, some of you already know using robotic process automation can help your business to be more efficient, agile, and profitable. And it can make the customers' experiences of your business richer by letting you serve them quickly, flexibly, and responsively. And yeah, put more joy in each employee's workday by taking repetitive work, all the mundane tasks out of the workday. Yeah, so basically take the robot really out of the human. That's basically what it's about. That, yeah, RPA technology is already transforming businesses of all kinds. All sorts of companies in the world have become convinced of automation's power and make it central to their strategies. And yeah, they embark on their automation journey. And now it's, yeah, I guess your time. It's out there, get going. But how do you really move forward? Where can your automation journey money take you in your business. And we doing this day in, day out, and we can tell you good news. There is no need to reinvent the wheel as such. Working with thousands of customers to scale and implement RPA, we have seen what works and what doesn't. Yeah, and while some of the, the actual details may be different and vary, we found that the most successful companies follow a 3-stage path. And yeah, for the first stage of that, I'd like to hand over to you, Arno.

Thanks, Sascha. Yeah, thanks for the good intro. So stage 1 really is all about getting started, and what we want to do is lay the foundation of a transformative RPA initiative. We want to discover the benefits through pilot projects and quick wins. So the first thing we want to do is to complete a successful proof of concept or proof of value, or what they called POC, to get started. You know, again, a good way to demonstrate the power of automation is to complete such a POC. It could be various sizes. You know, make sure the POC focuses on specific processes and pain points you have with this inside your business and clearly demonstrate how RPA or robotic process automation can improve efficiency, throughput, and overall process performance. And then go out and tell everybody, particularly senior management, C-suite management, tell them about the great POC results. And that will allow you to secure the commitments you need to establish your initial automation center of excellence and move forward with additional projects. The next thing you want to do is, is build out teams and governing frameworks. Now, in this program, we have talked a lot about governance, and in Stage 1, you want to lay the groundwork for a scaled-up automation effort. And again, you want to start by setting up the center of excellence. So Stage 1 is where many organizations establish the CoE or center of excellence to take responsibility for developing, deploying, managing, and measuring automation projects across the enterprise. And of course, what you need to do as well is you need to create a core team around you. So get started with a small number of skilled RPA developers and perhaps implementation manager. And as your successful track record grows, you know, so will your team. And, you know, and expanding your team will include more RPA developers and implementation managers, plus solution architects, business analysts, you know, and additional kind of SMEs or subject matter experts. Also, we want to look at establishing processes and roles. Now, that's the time to clearly define who does what within your RPA program, the way automations get done and delivered to the business, the selection criteria perhaps you'll use to build your project pipeline, your RPA project pipeline. And of course, the documentation you need, you know, to move things forward. So it's visible to everybody who does what and what's going on. And also, you want to sit down and take time to set out your plan for maintaining quality and the measuring of the impacts of of these projects across the business. So again, sort of stage 1 is sort of this initial ramp up. Let's deliver a POC. Let's get the governance frameworks ready. Let's spin up our center of excellence. Doesn't have to be too complicated. We of course need to have a startup core team, and we want to build on that team. We want to broadcast throughout the business and promote our RPA successes. And then as we mature, we want to formalize the roles and responsibilities of people, and that lays a really good solid foundation then for what we call Stage 2.

Yeah, great. Thank you, Arno. Yeah, Stage 2 is what we consider as scaling across the enterprise after the foundation is in place. As Arno mentioned, it's now about scaling the automation by focusing first, first on top-down cross-enterprise opportunities to have a big impact. So in that Stage 2, you typically will focus on capturing the, the, the value of top-down across the enterprise initiatives as you transform how major processes are executed, and you will extend the capabilities and the throughput of the automation function And yeah, expand the types of processes you can automate. Yeah, basically as part of that, it is really focusing on what is the ripest pipeline opportunity. So easy to implement automations with a very high return of investment, ROI. And then you will take on more big, bigger, complex cross-enterprise processes and start developing bigger and more complex automations. Of course, you will be generally touching more core systems, important functional areas, and other enterprise activities, key enterprise activities. That's very important. And you will embrace sort of the notion of continuous process improvement and enhance generally the abilities to launch, manage, and monitor and measure really larger digital workforce ongoing, executing more and more critical processes. So this is really scale. And yeah, your work probably will affect the work of really hundreds of thousands of employees. If you think about really across enterprise, across departments, lots of employees. Yeah. And of course, on the other side, customers and suppliers and doing more automation really across the business that ideally should have an impact also on the bottom line. And so the next part of that scaling means really as well, yeah, the extending, extending the RPA skill set and capabilities within the organization. We just mentioned earlier, complex cross-enterprise automations. And in order to handle that, you will need really a team that, that understands business processes first of all, and, and knows how to architect really elegant solutions. And, uh, yeah, also, um, understands how to integrate these automations into existing operations. So yeah, cross-enterprise, it is complex. You need a great team for that. So that, that means you will need to start hiring and expand your team. You need business analysts, infrastructure engineers, and of course managers overlooking the implementation of these larger process solutions. And yeah, so bringing developers, solution architects in there who can then build these intelligent automations, architects and developers who understand also AI and machine learning, because intelligent automations require OCR and natural language processing elements of that. So chatbot technologies. So it's, it's really more than just simple clicking on a screen with a robot. So, so yeah, it really is that extending the skill set in the company, focusing on really transformative projects. And yeah, that's what we consider as a Stage 2. And that brings us to Stage 3, Arno.

Yeah, so that nicely leads into Stage 3. So again, Stage 2 is all about this scaling across your enterprise. And once you reach that point, Stage 3 really is when you start transforming the business. And that's what we deem to be when you become a sort of a fully automated company, or as close as possible as fully automated by capturing automation opportunities. Across the enterprise. So all of these different blocks will be in place. And again, most people would love to get rid of all of their tedious everyday tasks and only focus really on the good parts of their work. I mean, you know, that, as we said in previous podcasts, that brings sort of very high levels of employee satisfaction, low levels of attrition. And really, that's what this is all about. You know, Stage 3 is to help them do that, you know, to really focus on the good part of their work. And And this is why a key element of this is really to provide automation to every person or to provide every person access to automation. So again, until now, you might have mainly focused on capturing big top-down opportunities to use automation to transform across enterprise processes that connects to your enterprise-level systems and enterprise processes. But there's also a sort of what we call a long tail of opportunities that needs to be addressed to use automation to improve, you know, the way thousands and thousands of these day-to-day activities are performed by employees. And again, separately, I guess these processes might not seem like much, but if you take them all together, it really, really adds up. And that's why I guess, you know, most automation forward-thinking companies or progressive thinking companies that uses automation provide their employees access to their own software robots. And this is why one of the reasons why we encourage people to do that as well, to provide robotic process to a person, to have a digital assistant that they can train to perhaps take advantage of these long-tail opportunities that can sometimes be very hard to identify when you look at sort of an enterprise level. And, you know, this is a new technology for most people. So the key here is to plan a campaign to introduce them to it and to get people enthusiastic, you know, about using robots, you know, and there's many sort of internal marketing events that you can create, like, you know, sponsored events or sponsoring events, for example, internal events, providing training, and also just providing people with access to ongoing support, guidance, reference resources, case studies with inside the business, you know, everything that just keep people engaged and interested in actually utilizing automation as part of their day-to-day job to get rid of those mundane activities. And I know we're speaking about technology today and RPA technology specific. But, you know, you want to make sure that what you provide to people is very friendly and easy to use, especially to non-technical business users. It should be very simple to launch a robot, you know, from your desktop, you know, as easy as opening your Outlook, for example. So that should be really easy and accessible, and people should know, you know, how how to access the robots, you know, and it just sort of becomes second nature that people think about perhaps desktop automation first when they see a problem. And then it kind of brings us to the final point where we talk about unleashing the power of the citizen developer. And really, citizen development is something that we have addressed in some of our podcasts. But essentially what it means is that we provide a set of tools to perhaps business stakeholders to enable them to build automations that makes a difference to their day-to-day life. So it could be automation where there's something coming to an inbox, there's a robot that actually grabs that attachment, grabs the data, the unstructured data, turns it into structured data and do something with it rather than the employee actually keying it in. Now, it could be something very simple like just taking the data and keying it into a spreadsheet, or could be something a bit more sophisticated like taking the attachment and going to a third-party system and submitting a document approval. So a citizen developer is typically somebody that assemble a simple automation like that. Now, if you look at the, you know, so across organization, there must be thousands of these little processes that, so if you give people access to the tools, they can become this sort of crowdsourced citizen developers to build out these automations with inside a governance framework. Of course, you know, we talked about governance and we wanna make sure that there's proper control and security around things. And you know, that's all covered by a center of excellence and and the way people do this. So again, to capture the long tail of automation opportunities, you know, you need to increase your development capacity. You can't just rely on your technical development, your RPA team. You want to dip into as lot as possible of your business, you know, community and allow them also to express themselves in their creativity and problem-solving skills using these tools. And again, this is exactly where citizen developers come in. And a future podcast, we will cover that a bit more in depth on the, you know, the era of the citizen developer. But essentially what I said earlier in a different way is it, these are non-technical people who are eager to learn how automation works and they want to use their skills to automate everyday problems, you know, like downloading a spreadsheet from an email and putting it somewhere, grabbing the data and putting that in a different system. That's a very simple example. And of course, citizen developers will need training, encouragement, and mentorship, you know. So those are the things that we need to provide for them. And also, you know, we wanna present to them very easy to use low-code build platforms, you know. And between myself and Sasha, the stuff we do, you know, you look at the likes of, you know, Blue Prism, UiPath, NetCall RPA, Microsoft Power Automate, all of those are low-code platforms. So usually if people can build something or use Excel, I would say that they qualify to be a citizen developer using these tools because it is easy to get used to them and it's easy to get started with automation. So that's, that's the sort of the, the Stage 3 in a nutshell. And I think that that's when you will start to see some of the transformative outcomes or transformative behaviors within your business that will come to light when you're on this automation journey using RPA.

That's great. Thank you, Arno. Yeah, you mentioned something really, really exciting there. So we need more citizen developers in these larger organizations. Or in general to look at these long-tail automation opportunities. And yeah, that's why as well why we put the Automation Guys community together. And for everyone who wants to become a citizen developer, especially around the topic RPA to start with, yeah, we have a sandbox available for our community members. Where it's super easy to get started on it. So maybe you already think about a problem in your department, like Arno mentioned, there's a supplier portal and I always have to download something and it really takes me 50 minutes every day and lots of other things. Why not automate it? And yeah, within our community in the sandbox, you can experiment with those things and bring that knowledge back into your organization and maybe raise sort of an opportunity in the systems at the Center of Excellence and say, hey, look at this, this is really working. Or ideally really implement that straight away in your company, but have your own sandbox to fiddle around and learn things. So yeah, this is why, exactly why we put the community together for all people out there, for professionals out there within organizations, or maybe not in organizations yet, but very interested on the topic. Quick. Yeah, that's, that's why we put the community in there to learn these, these, these skills. Yeah, to get started.

Yeah, and I think that it's your opportunity to show off, show off your skills. Indeed, yeah, show off your creativity. The sandbox is a very safe environment. It's got all of the low-code tools to build a robot preloaded. There's some good examples on it as well. You've got basically a fully functional desktop with a robot development studio that you can develop your robot and you can also test it there just to really understand what's the sort of interesting things you can build. Like Sasha said, you know, it might be something that you could put yourself in the limelight, you know, show that to your manager, show that to somebody in finance that you work with and say, listen, I've heard about these robots, I've actually tinkered around with this thing. And look, it can actually do some number crunching for me and save me a couple of hours a day. Imagine if we have 10 of these processes, how many hours this can save me a week or a month. So like Sasha say, on our web page, theautomationguys.net, there's a subscription offer. Please subscribe to that. It will automatically provision your environment for you. And that will get you started on your RPA journey. And again, you know, if there's any questions you have, you know, between me and Sasha, we've got collectively over 40 years automation experience. I'm pretty sure this between us will be able to provide an answer, or if we can't, we'll be able to get you an answer and try these things out. And hopefully today's podcast as well will encourage people out there that wants to get started with automation and not really sure how to do it. You know, the key concept is start small, show something off, and, you know, just build on top of that success. Showcase it internally, you know, make sure the right people see it. And again, you know, work out the benefit it can provide your business. You know, if you save an hour a day here and there, it soon adds up. And these are the times that that could be spent to be more productive on other things. And also the savings in these times are usually enough to pay for these projects and also the software investment. So RPA specifically has got a very, very big return of investment that you realize very quickly, and that's why a lot of businesses are taking advantage of it. And if you haven't done so, you should be looking into it because a lot of people out there is doing it. And of course, what they're doing is they're moving to the next level where They're augmenting it now with artificial intelligence and artificial chatbots, low-code tools, sophisticated data mining. But again, it's never too late to start.

Amazing. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks, thanks a lot for listening to today's episode. And yeah, we will be back very soon. And until then, let's automate it. Basically, 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! [MUSIC] [MUSIC]