Search for Opportunities or Automate the Biggest Pains? It Depends

RPA has become a must-have piece of enterprise IT infrastructure. Gartner predicts that 90% of large organizations globally will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022. At the same time, years of automation experience teach us that different companies approach process automation differently.

Even before starting the conversation with automation experts, some organizations know precisely what they want to automate today and tomorrow. They feel they understand the processes well enough, have identified the pain points, and are ready to automate. Others take time to run internal workshops or external consulting projects to identify and prioritize automation opportunities before building bots. What is the preferred approach, and where should you start? What technology can help you to move faster and more efficiently?

Growing companies have pains

We have noticed among our customers that the difference in approach depends on the company’s size and level of maturity. Fast-growing mid-size companies usually have a specific process problem at hand. When business leaders consider automation, their goal is to solve that problem, fix sub-efficient processes, and improve productivity or reduce costs. They start automation by analyzing and documenting the process, capturing process steps, and identifying particular tasks that could be automated.

Automation Anywhere Process Discovery is the tool for that job. It helps to automatically capture user activities and document processes, providing the correct level of process information that helps accelerate automation.

Established companies discover opportunities

Large-sized enterprise organizations typically run ongoing process improvement programs. Established organizations have fewer major process issues; those usually have been addressed in the past. At the same time, the long history and broader IT infrastructure of such organizations create many more minor disconnects and inefficiencies, which are not top of mind but still hide a huge potential for process improvements. Examples of those are inefficient connections to core legacy applications (often on mainframes), decentralized regional tools to support local procedures, which often require manual data transfer, and cross-functional processes, which may not be automated at all.

Enterprises use different approaches to identify these issues: hire process consultants, run process mining tools, and organize internal workshops and brainstorming sessions. All these methods have certain limitations. Consultants receive the idealistic view of the process as business users show them only their best work. Process mining doesn’t cover manual steps and many cross-system interactions. Internal workshops can also identify only those issues that people feel safe to expose. Discovery Bot helps uncover the truth and record user activities “as-is” to identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities that the other methods have difficulty achieving.

What all organizations need

As discussed, organizations of different sizes and maturity deal with various challenges. Yet, what is common among them is, to automate, they need to understand the process down to every user action—the truth and nothing but the truth. And a process documentation and analysis tool such as Discovery Bot can help capture the required level of process details and document the process before it’s automated to achieve success.

In addition, check out our new RPA Maturity Assessment tool. It can help you evaluate the maturity of your RPA program and identify what’s needed to expand automation across your company.