Discovering What to Automate with RPA

Make no mistake about it: how well an organization integrates digital technologies will be a key factor in determining that organization’s success in the emerging digital landscape. Yet, to maximize the potential of digital technologies and the benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), organizations must first select the strongest candidates for automation.

Evaluating each individual process is necessary to identify the best use cases in your organization and ensure that your automation initiatives will be successful. However, this activity is time-consuming and doing it manually can leave room for errors. In fact, a typical company manual process analysis and documentation prior to automation takes up to 60-80% of the total automation efforts. And it’s important to do it right because you may never get to the implementation phase.

What makes a good automation candidate

With Forrester projecting spending on RPA to reach $1.5 billion by 2020, you need to make sure that your company is getting returns on its RPA investment. The best way to ensure that is by using process discovery to determine if a particular process is a good candidate for automation.

There are four questions that can help identity processes that should be automated:

1. Is the process repetitive?
2. Is it high-volume?
3. Is it a rule-based process?
4. Is it prone to human error?

If the answer to all four questions is yes, the process you’re considering automating is probably a good RPA candidate. 

The automation opportunity assessment

When organizations lack documented processes and work in silos, that situation makes it difficult to understand which activities should be automated. Many organizations jump into RPA with significant blind spots in their existing processes. In the best-case scenario, this limits the benefits an organization receives from RPA. In the worst-case scenario, it makes RPA initiatives fail. While manually going through the necessary steps for process discovery and identifying candidates for automation requires significant work, it’s critical. Luckily, there are process discovery tools available that can help.

Process Discovery, a process discovery tool is offered as part of our Digital Workforce platform, can quickly do all of the laborious process discovery work.

As an intelligent process discovery solution, it records user activities, helps to identify and prioritize automation opportunities, and creates bots to automate them. Discovery Bot streamlines your automation by accelerating process analysis and documentation. It also helps you to scale your automation initiatives by identifying and prioritizing high value automation opportunities.

Process discovery is a critical preparation step that you can’t avoid in your process improvement efforts. But with the right tools, you can do it efficiently accelerating your automation journey and reaping the RPA benefits.