#9 - 5 RPA Mistakes To Avoid

What are the reasons that robotic process automation has been underwhelming in many cases? In today's episode, we will go over 5 of the biggest RPA mistakes that too many businesses make so that you can avoid them in your organization. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. My name is Sascha Kottura and also here with me is Arno van Rooyen and we are the Automation Guys. So, so why is that just quite a limited number of executives see success from RPA? Is rolling out an RPA implementation a guarantee that it will actually be meaningful or useful? Arno, I believe between us we have probably delivered 30 or more successful RPA projects over the last couple of years to organizations. What do you think is, is a good topic to start with for, for our 5 RPA mistakes to avoid?

I think ambition is the first one, Sascha. I think what we see is that if you look at RPA, it is a very, very fast-growing technology sector. Like McKinsey and Company highlighted in a recent report, the return of investment in RPA projects can be up to 200% in the first year alone. And I think what people do is they take that 200% ROI value at face value, and they have got a very, very big ambitious sort of idea that RPA should revolutionize their business. Now, like digital transformation, RPA has got the power to radically change your business for the better, but it takes time. And if you go too fast, too soon with an RPA deployment, you know, that can sometimes be a recipe for disaster. What we find is that RPA is more of an evolutionary sort of thing that you need to look at with inside your business. I think RPA could be looked at something that you could deploy tactically to have immediate impacts with inside your business. And then from there on, evolutionary sort of roll it out, you know, to achieve sort of the realistic achievable goals and milestones that you set your site— well, that you set out for your business. So although ambition is a good thing, I think you need to keep it realistic. And on paper, you could look at it and say, you know, we could look at this sort of RPA as something that's 20% or RPA bot is 20 times faster than a human. But the reality is that you would still have to, you know, go through the, the motion of actually training these bots. You have to go through the motion of actually getting these bots into your business. In our previous podcast, we talk about change management, so, so that's the sort of thing that you need to look at. So I think ambition is, is definitely a factor, and that could be a biggest mistake you make if the ambition is too, too big, and that these projects fail And that's what you want to avoid. I think you want to roll it into your business at a pace and at a scale that you could manage. And also, you know, you want to embed this into your business, I guess, at a sensible speed. So you could adapt to the changes and you can align your staff to what these robots do. And also, you know, use that time to redeploy your stuff, starting to do other things, right?

Yeah, very good. Good. So that's bringing us to mistake number 2: expecting too much. So similar like being too ambitious, yeah, we are very often, we get, I think, quite excited about the RPA opportunity so that we as well expect too much what it can bring us. So what RPA is well, could be potentially very transformative for your business. It is not necessarily like a secret superpower with all the answers either. So it can do a lot, but not necessarily everything. So for example, you won't be able to create your own automated robotic workforce. So just getting rid of all your people in your business. So maybe some businesses think, and some business owners think, okay, by bringing in RPA so they can sort of reduce their workforce. What we see actually quite the opposite. So most companies who are employing RPA, these are growing businesses, so they just want to get more done. And when they scale the business, is it more risk-free or want to be more more capable of scaling really, because obviously with humans there's maybe a bit of a risk factor. So you can make it more productive and more stable. So, but there's so much stuff within RPA, there are lots of business activities that can't be done by RPA really. So you need some complex work still to be done by your human employees. You need very creative thinking that obviously needs to be done by your employees. And you would pass it on to your— only the activities which are high volume, sort of repetitive, very rules-based and standard. So this is the kind of stuff you would pass on easily to your bots. But everything else, yeah, you definitely need your humans or your human employees as part of it. They need to do the oversight, just need to make sure everything runs smooth. So the future is not just RPA, the future is bots, people, and AI as well. Yeah, I think all together, really.

Yeah, and that, that's good. And I think the expectation sometimes is very high of people when they look at RPA, you know, what it can achieve, because again, like I say, the technology vendors push out a specific narrative around what it what it can do. I think the reality with RPA is that, and this kind of brings us to mistake number 3, which is choosing the right activities for RPA to do. The reality is in a recent McKinsey report, they estimated that with its current form, RPA can replace roughly up to about 45% of tasks performed by, you know, human employees. Now, these tasks tend to have a specific form, and like you said, these are more sort of rules-based, highly predictable type of tasks that, you know, you don't really need much sort of decision— you don't really need to have a high degree of decision-making with insight. These tasks, and they tend to be sort of high-volume repetitive tasks like data entry tasks. These sort of things are the right activities to deploy RPA for. You know, one example they used is, you know, you wouldn't deploy an RPA robot, for example, to replace your CEO. And, you know, I think this is what people need to realize is that you could potentially replace, I guess, 40% of these manual repetitive tasks with inside your business. But, you know, artificial intelligence hasn't really reached that point where RPA robots can automate everything under the sun. And that's something you need to remember. Now, what we see is that when we speak to our customers, you know, they look at RPA, the expectation is really high. They think they can just start deploying RPA bots to, you know, automate all sorts of activities. And then when you start sort of getting into the details of what can be achieved, there is a degree of reality that sets in, and people do tend to then start to realize, oh, I can see, you know, it can't necessarily make these decisions. But what it could do is, you know, automate these high-volume, low-value transactions. And that's still useful, right? You know, this is still stuff that makes your business, you know, a lot more automated than, you know, without using RPA, for example.

Absolutely. Especially when the businesses are scaling. I think every little bit you can automate. Last time you mentioned something really cool. And I say, whatever can be automated should be automated. And I think if it's even 40%, but if this is something which should be automated, then let's automate it where it makes sense. And in some areas of the business, it can be even much higher. I think in some back offices, you can see percentages going up to 80% because they are even more structured activities. So really, really good results now.

Yeah.

Okay, so the next mistake on our list, mistake number 4: having poorly designed processes. Say we covered that as well in, in one of our recent podcasts. So yeah, if you have a really bad process and you automate that process, the process is not necessarily getting better, and it's just, it's, it's an automated bad process. And I think the Yeah, I think if you have already a very slow and inefficient process, then yeah, it's fine, it's automated, your employees not necessarily get involved with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're using your robotic workforce, your digital workforce as efficient as possible either. So if they are going a lot of, through lots of stuff which is actually not necessary, first of all, you have to develop all that stuff which is maybe not necessary with your developers, and on the other side, yeah, you just use the capacity your digital workforce has. So you should be there quite clever as well. So it is a very valuable— yeah, RPA is very valuable as such, but still you should look at your bottlenecks in the process before you actually jump onto these activities. And yeah, to get really the most out of it.

Yeah, and I think, you know, happily having poorly designed processes is a common mistake, but also I think choosing the wrong processes to automate is also a mistake. So if you take garbage and you automate it, you're going to just have more garbage quicker. But I think you can also automate the wrong things. So it is very important to understand the areas in your business where RPA could have the maximum impact. And, you know, from my experience, you know, and the last sort of 5 years working with RPA, the same old sort of, I think, pattern emerges. If you look for RPA process, to automate and you want to gauge if it's the right one, it tends to be those low-value, high-volume transactional processes, you know, things that happens in a repetitive fashion. They tend to happen in finance where there's a lot of churn of transactions that's, you know, quite mundane, it's predictable, but there's thousands or hundreds of thousands of these these, these, these sort of transaction processing that happens. And yes, having a poorly designed process is bad, but also choosing the wrong process is even worse. Because, you know, why would you choose a process that is not high volume for RPA bot? Because, you know, that process inherently is probably something that needs to be done by a human anyway, because you need human decision-making to make a judgment call. So I think again, the poorly designed processes and also the wrong processes, they do go hand in hand. And it kind of brings us to mistake number 5, which is not securing enough buy-in from stakeholders within the business. Now, you know, I think if you want to have a maximum effectiveness within your business for RPA, You know, everybody in the organization needs to be committed to its success. Obviously, your IT department will be responsible for deploying your RPA solution, but you also need to secure buy-in from managers, executives, and, you know, other key stakeholders with inside the business that will have the final say. And you need to have these buy-in to, to really ensure that the RPA initiatives that you roll out is successful. Because, you know, these are the people that's gonna be the evangelists with inside the business. They're gonna be the people that backs up the, the fact that RPA would potentially transform the business. And again, if you don't have that sort of backing, that executive backing, then it's going to be a very, very hard thing to to actually promote with inside the business. People perhaps won't take it too seriously. So it is really something that from the start of your RPA journey, you need to make sure that these key stakeholders are on board and they do understand the value that it can bring to the business and also to drive its success. And there needs to be frequent communication you know, with these stakeholders about the state of RPA with inside the business, you know, what the current successes are, what's the sort of success stories that is, or successes has been achieved with inside the business, and also to promote it further by, you know, further rolling out the program, perhaps training programs visibility into RPA, further promotion, you know, all of these things that would ensure that there's more people behind it in the business than the other way around, right? And I think that will then start to change the culture with inside a business of, you know, or well, towards automation first, because If the sort of senior stakeholders, senior executives, directors, C-suite, if all of these people are behind RPA, you know, most people will join that movement. And if something comes into the business, you know, people will look at it through automation lens rather than saying, okay, you know, there's something new we need to look at, there's a new process, for instance, let's do it manually. Again, if you have the right buy-in from stakeholders and you've already proven the success of RPA, people will rather jump on the automation bandwagon, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, you mentioned solid sort of training and education. I think even now being remote, so we obviously know training a lot, you just go into a big training room and do your one week of training. But I think currently all the vendors in the RPA space, They offer really, really great training programs and certifications sort of online. There are really good academies out there. So this, I guess, a good way for teams to really as well just dive in and understand as much as possible at the moment, probably not being able to go into onsite courses. So it shouldn't be a stopper. Everyone can, I think, absorb as much as possible on these technologies.

Yeah, and most vendors do offer free training courses.

Free training, yeah, as well.

Yeah, UiPath, for example. And I think, you know, what we see is that the training courses that people sort of go through, it's not necessarily turning them into professional RPA developers, but what it does, it does show them the art of the possible and how easy it is to tackle problems using RPA. So by the time it actually ideas turns into working software bots. A lot of those people that went on that training, the way they sort of express that and tell that story on what a robot potentially can do is so much more clear. And when they speak to companies like us and they say, well, we need a robot to execute a schedule execute this transaction in an unattended fashion. That's easy for us then to understand what they mean because they've already formulated sort of an idea in their head, you know, how this software bot should solve the problem. So I think training is definitely— training and awareness is definitely something that should be, you know, not overlooked. And I think that's probably a common mistake where we, you know, approach RPA projects We explain to people or attempt to explain to them exactly what it is. They didn't think it's this magic silver bullet that will just solve a lot of the automation problems. But again, like we highlighted in these, these common 5 mistakes, that's not really the reality. And I think training and awareness is one of those things that it's almost like a MythBuster, isn't it? Where people then really understand, okay, we see it can do sort of roughly 40% of the manual things, that we do, but that is still a big deal if we choose the right process, if we don't automate a rubbish process, if we make sure that, you know, we get stakeholder buy-in, if we make sure we're not too ambitious, for example, you know. So these are just common little things that, you know, from inception, if you start your RPA journey, really makes a big difference to the end goal and to where you get with RPA.

Great. Yeah, so sort of to sum it up, so there is really no sort of one foolproof kind of method for implementing RPA really. So every department anyway faces sort of different obstacles to efficiency and different results are needed in different departments. You mentioned finance department earlier, so they have completely different efficiencies understandings than an HR department. But Yes, we covered, yes, we went through the 5 mistakes today. So there are certain really common mistakes and pitfalls we really see, and yeah, it's very important to understand and consider them, and yeah, for very, for very successful automation journey. So yeah, we hope a few of these points will help you in your business and on your journey to RPA success. And yeah, as always, a big thank you to all of our listeners. Thanks also a lot for the regular feedback we are receiving. This is very much appreciated and will really help us to make more episodes for you and cover more topics you really are interested in in the automation space. And yeah, I think one more thing. Please join us also weekly for our weekly weekly, twice, Let's Talk Automation on Clubhouse. We will put our infos and links into the show notes so you can then really follow us on Clubhouse and never miss a great talk on there. And if you like to find out more about us, the Automation Guys, and see all our upcoming events and workshops, visit us on theautomationguys.net. And yeah, that's all from us. Yeah, thank you and bye-bye. 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.