Handmade chasm or the path from the RPA pilot to company-wide implementation
What is RPA? A small child can be said: “the robot will wash the dishes for you and clean the room, and you can spend your time on games and books,” and the head of a large organization “is a powerful but easy tool for business processes to run faster, with fewer errors using fewer resources. ”
Robotics have huge potential. Already, RPA sieves a whole range of tasks: it migrates data, creates reports, removes routine from business processes, trains new employees, integrates various systems among themselves, provides multi- and omni-channel contact centers, automates work with primary accounting documents, replaces toolkit automatic testing and the list goes on.
RPA technology is not new, in one form or another, it has been almost 20 years old, but the development boom occurs in the last two or three years, with the advent of new, strong players and large, successful projects that have saved companies billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.
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Almost any introduction of a new technology begins with a pilot project. The RPA pilot, as a rule, passes fairly easily and shows tangible benefits of the approach. But, as with many other technologies that require a serious change in the approach to the organization of production processes, the next steps after the pilot often cause psychological difficulties.
Often, a pilot RPA-project ends with the Moscow Art Theater Pause, a period of intense waiting, when it is already clear that this is a necessary thing, but no one knows how to move from the first attempt to a serious implementation. Problems, primarily organizational ones, create an almost insuperable gulf in the way, and often there is no clear way to overcome it.
In this article, I will list the conditional top-10 problems that arise during the implementation of RPA and I will try to give some practical recommendations on how the RPA-team can “grow its wings” and fly over this chasm.
So, how can you maximally impede the introduction of new technology?
The mistake is that solving the current tasks with the help of RPA, we do not think about the strategic goal of our work.
On the surface, RPA is a magic wand for those who have a lot of boredom in their work: transfer data from one system to another, compile a report on materials from several databases, automate the routine tasks of an accountant or administrator, etc.
There is a temptation to dwell on simply holding the toolkit at the ready and, if such a situation is discovered, begin its ad-hoc robot, or, as they say, “write a script”. But the problem here is that in order to gain weight and importance in the eyes of the company's management, any initiative must have a clearly formulated global goal and a clear plan for achieving it.
Without such a plan, it is almost impossible to achieve the scale of the initiative, and without scale, no one in a large company will notice that something like this was, RPA will remain a toy in the hands of the administrators who once had the task “to see what kind of robots they were.” But they will not notice - they will not help to create a team, they will not give the team money, they will write down the whole direction as unpromising.
To avoid this problem, by the time the pilot project is launched, it is already necessary to clearly understand what goal the company wants to achieve with the help of RPA, to have a high-level strategic plan with control points, metrics, etc. Why not at the time of the end? Because the choice of a pilot process, and the evaluation of its results - all of this naturally follows from the choice of a strategic goal and methods for achieving it.
The mistake lies in the fact that RPA is perceived as a tool for the IT team, and completely transfer all the initiative there, without connecting a business and creating a cross-functional team
We often see that inertia of thinking makes people reason like this: “This is a software product, which means it has nothing to do with business. Let the experts deal with him. ”
RPA, first of all, solves problems and business problems, optimizing and automating existing business processes in a company. The fact that, where and how to do, knows only the business, which means that the team involved in robotization must necessarily include representatives of those for whom it works, be aware of where the most routine and ineffective solutions are worth paying attention to Firstly.
Business, remembering that IT people all the time requires answers to various difficult questions and interferes with progress in general, decides that RPA can be managed with its own forces and external contractors. At the same time, of course, the calculation that there will be no months-long approvals, it will not be necessary to write documentation, request accounts and everything that interferes so quickly and efficiently.
Of course, in almost any large Russian enterprise, the number of administrative procedures required to create a new product or service is amazing. But we must understand that this, more often than not, is not a whim and bureaucracy, but a real, vital necessity.
When implementing even such an “easy” and “simple” solution as RPA, you still need to think about security, infrastructure, monitoring robots, and a million other things that a business cannot do without IT. Not bad, when a business tries to look at robots, not expecting to come to it with this initiative, it’s not bad when business users write processes for themselves, but, of course, within the company, don’t involve DIT in the initiative from the moment it starts. this is a catastrophe.
Without IT, you can forget about scaling the solution, about its normal support, not to mention the fact that robots often need to be optimized using API, Powershell scripts, integration with scripts in Python and other things that are not easily understood by business.
And still have to overcome the syndrome " Not invented here ", and the "IT people" he is strong, like no one else.
A common mistake, resulting from the fact that after the first successful step, the team seems to be able to cope with it. The processes that are difficult to automate are selected, and it is even worse when they are randomly assigned for political or other reasons, without thinking about why this process falls to the RPA team.
When choosing processes for robotization, you need to dwell on those that can bring the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. But speaking about the benefits, it is worth thinking that this may be one of many factors, the priority of each of which depends on the specific point:
On the other hand, there are several reasons why the process robotization should be abandoned, or, at least, how to think about it properly:
In this case, the most important selection criterion should always be one thing: the complementarity of the process of the strategic goal of the robotization initiative.
In robotization, the Pareto rule is more true than ever. Most often, you can quickly robotize one process or another almost entirely, and then another month or two to fight over some “small” piece of it, which turned out to be difficult to formalize, or requires complex technical solutions in order to work smoothly.
In this case, it makes sense to ask yourself whether we want to have 100% automation of the process or what we have already done is enough to benefit the company and switch the RPA team to another task? Almost always, you can rebuild the process so that the robot does all the dirty, preparatory work, transfers its results to the person to make a decision, and then the robot performs the routine actions to complete the process. We can say that 80% of automation is more than enough for most tasks.
At the beginning of the robotic process, when the team has not yet gained enough experience, it makes sense to choose easily achievable goals that will gain self-confidence, gain weight in the eyes of the company, and are not afraid of compromise solutions.
An error that occurs when no difference is made between projects for, for example, SAP and RPA.
Robotization gives the maximum effect where we spend much less time and effort on it than on “full-fledged” automation. And this means that it is necessary with all our power to ensure that robotization is as fast as possible, and that labor costs for it are significantly and provably smaller than other solutions for the same task.
Most often, in large enterprises, this problem is expressed in the fact that any IT decision is made to run through a number of checks and approvals, and the entire project is driven using a “heavy” development methodology, such as RUP.
This approach, which has proven itself to create and support large solutions, fails on projects where the whole cycle should last 2-3 months. If the process can be automated two to three times faster than all the necessary approvals are required, you need to change the approach, ensure that the robots can pass the checks faster, accompany them with a smaller amount of documentation, etc.
Where the Agile approach is already used, at least for some products, it makes sense to find out whether the development of robots can also be attributed to this category.
Where everything is still “serious”, you need to spend a lot of time on learning and explaining what robots are, what they eat and why they need special attention.
The consequence of the fact that the pilot who is easily given creates a "dizzy with success," and it seems that you can go further from victory to victory, without putting serious effort to it.
To create a pilot, usually download a free version of the platform from the Internet (for example, UiPath Community Edition or RPA Express ) and start creating. By a team of two or three people, it is quite realistic to make and launch the first process in a couple of months. But for a large company this is not enough, we need dozens of processes that robotize business processes in different areas, running on many different computers, servers, virtual machines.
Getting a full-fledged implementation is impossible without gathering the backbone of the team, training specialists, obtaining the necessary resources, etc. etc. So, all this needs to be thought out, prepared and coordinated in advance, you need to find those to whom the task will be really interesting.
Often the complexity of this task is underestimated in the initial stages of the project, which, further, leads to unpleasant disappointments.
An error occurs when the effect of PRA implementation is calculated based only on the obvious metric - “FTE savings”. The problem here is that in our reality, where salaries in the regions are comparable to the cost of a robot license, this metric fails, leaving most of the processes behind the line, when a positive ROI can be obtained in 9-12 months (in the US or Western Europe, this is usually about 6 months).
Here you need to understand that the effectiveness of RPA is measured in a more complex way than just saving man-hours. It is necessary to take into account the fact that the processes begin to work much faster, unloading the multi-week “waiting lists”, and that the percentage of errors that were previously introduced by the “human factor” and the inability to add additional checks to the long and complex process is reduced.
There are even more difficult measurable indicators, such as increased employee satisfaction with their work (which means less layoffs, which means less pressure on HR), improved customer relationships (their requests are processed faster and without errors), better process controllability and many other factors.
In the short term, it is difficult to create a model for calculating the efficiency of the RPA, which will fully take into account all these factors, but this does not mean that it does not need to be pursued and that such a model, although incomplete or preliminary, should not exist from the first days of the robotization program.
By the way, when calculating the cost it is taken into account that the robot works 24x7, does not get sick, does not occupy a place in the office, it does not have to pay taxes and deductions to the pension fund, etc. - it turns out that the cost of the robot is quite comparable with the cost of the employee. This means that real people should bring real benefits by doing interesting work, rather than shifting documents from one folder to another.
If decision makers do not understand what RPA is, why it is needed and why the company is engaged in it, it will not be possible to go far along the path of robotization.
It is often underestimated the need for a coherent strategy for the implementation of RPA, involving all levels of the company, from top management to key performers.
This is especially important at the initial stage, when the program has not yet recommended itself, and it is necessary to engage in its popularization.
You need to enlist support from above: for the company to publicly support the introduction of robots, this was discussed at general meetings, divisions were set automation goals, etc. But support is also needed from the bottom: employees must understand that robots do not rob them of their work, but take boring routine tasks, do not interfere in solving problems, but simplify their solution. The IT team must understand that their participation is not just necessary, but also necessary, the business must understand that they have a decisive word in how the robotization of their processes will be carried out, the SC must be sure that the robots do not create a gaping hole in safety and etc.
In general, explaining to important people of the company why they need RPA and how it will help them is perhaps the most difficult, but the most important thing the team will have to do.
Moving forward, not quite understanding why, where and how we are going to do this is a frequent, but, unfortunately, from no less important problem.
Strategic development involves a clearly defined goal, which the entire RPA team must share and which must be coordinated with decision makers.
Such a development should have reference points rigidly tied to the time “by 2020, make 10 processes”, “by the end of Q2'19 to robotize HR processes by 50%”, “create a library of at least 50 reusable components this month”, “ transfer 20% of automated tests in development to the RPA platform. ”
There must be metrics: NPS, FTE savings, robot recycling, and so on.
Must be defined (or planned to determine) the role in the team, the criteria for selecting processes, criteria for measuring success and more.
All this, in aggregate, will help not only to understand whether the implementation of RPA in a company moves well or badly, but also to convincingly explain this to the concerned authorities or the management of related departments. It will be much easier for people to participate in the initiative if they can clearly and clearly explain what it does and how.
So, if desired, the second quote for this item can safely put the unforgettable
RPA can be a powerful tool to assist in the digital transformation of a company, and therefore the strategy of using robotization should be part of the overall digitalization strategy.
But in order for robots to help the company move along the path to a digital future, it’s not enough to say the magic words “RPA”, “ML”, “OCR”, you also need to work a little bit to have a friendly, motivated and purposeful team behind these words with a clear plan of action and support at all levels of the organization, from management to employees.
Of course, it is not easy, of course, in real life, the abyss on the path sometimes seems insurmountable.
But, completing the article with another quote from Karl Clausewitz:
In preparing the article used materials
Robotics have huge potential. Already, RPA sieves a whole range of tasks: it migrates data, creates reports, removes routine from business processes, trains new employees, integrates various systems among themselves, provides multi- and omni-channel contact centers, automates work with primary accounting documents, replaces toolkit automatic testing and the list goes on.
RPA technology is not new, in one form or another, it has been almost 20 years old, but the development boom occurs in the last two or three years, with the advent of new, strong players and large, successful projects that have saved companies billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.
')
Almost any introduction of a new technology begins with a pilot project. The RPA pilot, as a rule, passes fairly easily and shows tangible benefits of the approach. But, as with many other technologies that require a serious change in the approach to the organization of production processes, the next steps after the pilot often cause psychological difficulties.
Often, a pilot RPA-project ends with the Moscow Art Theater Pause, a period of intense waiting, when it is already clear that this is a necessary thing, but no one knows how to move from the first attempt to a serious implementation. Problems, primarily organizational ones, create an almost insuperable gulf in the way, and often there is no clear way to overcome it.
In this article, I will list the conditional top-10 problems that arise during the implementation of RPA and I will try to give some practical recommendations on how the RPA-team can “grow its wings” and fly over this chasm.
So, how can you maximally impede the introduction of new technology?
Use a tactical approach to RPA
Tactics without strategy - vanity before defeat.
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
The mistake is that solving the current tasks with the help of RPA, we do not think about the strategic goal of our work.
On the surface, RPA is a magic wand for those who have a lot of boredom in their work: transfer data from one system to another, compile a report on materials from several databases, automate the routine tasks of an accountant or administrator, etc.
There is a temptation to dwell on simply holding the toolkit at the ready and, if such a situation is discovered, begin its ad-hoc robot, or, as they say, “write a script”. But the problem here is that in order to gain weight and importance in the eyes of the company's management, any initiative must have a clearly formulated global goal and a clear plan for achieving it.
Without such a plan, it is almost impossible to achieve the scale of the initiative, and without scale, no one in a large company will notice that something like this was, RPA will remain a toy in the hands of the administrators who once had the task “to see what kind of robots they were.” But they will not notice - they will not help to create a team, they will not give the team money, they will write down the whole direction as unpromising.
To avoid this problem, by the time the pilot project is launched, it is already necessary to clearly understand what goal the company wants to achieve with the help of RPA, to have a high-level strategic plan with control points, metrics, etc. Why not at the time of the end? Because the choice of a pilot process, and the evaluation of its results - all of this naturally follows from the choice of a strategic goal and methods for achieving it.
Implement RPA as a pure IT solution
War is the continuation of politics.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
The mistake lies in the fact that RPA is perceived as a tool for the IT team, and completely transfer all the initiative there, without connecting a business and creating a cross-functional team
We often see that inertia of thinking makes people reason like this: “This is a software product, which means it has nothing to do with business. Let the experts deal with him. ”
RPA, first of all, solves problems and business problems, optimizing and automating existing business processes in a company. The fact that, where and how to do, knows only the business, which means that the team involved in robotization must necessarily include representatives of those for whom it works, be aware of where the most routine and ineffective solutions are worth paying attention to Firstly.
Or vice versa, forget about IT
The inhabitants of the kingdoms U and Yue do not love each other. But if they cross the river in the same boat and are caught in a storm, they will save each other like the right left hand.
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
Business, remembering that IT people all the time requires answers to various difficult questions and interferes with progress in general, decides that RPA can be managed with its own forces and external contractors. At the same time, of course, the calculation that there will be no months-long approvals, it will not be necessary to write documentation, request accounts and everything that interferes so quickly and efficiently.
Of course, in almost any large Russian enterprise, the number of administrative procedures required to create a new product or service is amazing. But we must understand that this, more often than not, is not a whim and bureaucracy, but a real, vital necessity.
When implementing even such an “easy” and “simple” solution as RPA, you still need to think about security, infrastructure, monitoring robots, and a million other things that a business cannot do without IT. Not bad, when a business tries to look at robots, not expecting to come to it with this initiative, it’s not bad when business users write processes for themselves, but, of course, within the company, don’t involve DIT in the initiative from the moment it starts. this is a catastrophe.
Without IT, you can forget about scaling the solution, about its normal support, not to mention the fact that robots often need to be optimized using API, Powershell scripts, integration with scripts in Python and other things that are not easily understood by business.
And still have to overcome the syndrome " Not invented here ", and the "IT people" he is strong, like no one else.
Automating "not those" processes
If you want to win, beat at the very heart of the enemy.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
A common mistake, resulting from the fact that after the first successful step, the team seems to be able to cope with it. The processes that are difficult to automate are selected, and it is even worse when they are randomly assigned for political or other reasons, without thinking about why this process falls to the RPA team.
When choosing processes for robotization, you need to dwell on those that can bring the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. But speaking about the benefits, it is worth thinking that this may be one of many factors, the priority of each of which depends on the specific point:
- Saving labor and other company resources
- Employee Motivation
- Improving customer service
- Involving teams that previously did not want to hear about RPA
- Increasing the value of RPA in the eyes of decision makers
On the other hand, there are several reasons why the process robotization should be abandoned, or, at least, how to think about it properly:
- Unprovable Saving
- Non-formalizable business process
- Stealth process for decision makers
- Tough rejection of robotization by those to whom it is intended to help
- Technical factors: the complexity of the robotization, the system that is going to turn off soon, problems with information security, etc.
In this case, the most important selection criterion should always be one thing: the complementarity of the process of the strategic goal of the robotization initiative.
Trying to achieve "total" robotization
War loves victory and does not like duration.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
In robotization, the Pareto rule is more true than ever. Most often, you can quickly robotize one process or another almost entirely, and then another month or two to fight over some “small” piece of it, which turned out to be difficult to formalize, or requires complex technical solutions in order to work smoothly.
In this case, it makes sense to ask yourself whether we want to have 100% automation of the process or what we have already done is enough to benefit the company and switch the RPA team to another task? Almost always, you can rebuild the process so that the robot does all the dirty, preparatory work, transfers its results to the person to make a decision, and then the robot performs the routine actions to complete the process. We can say that 80% of automation is more than enough for most tasks.
At the beginning of the robotic process, when the team has not yet gained enough experience, it makes sense to choose easily achievable goals that will gain self-confidence, gain weight in the eyes of the company, and are not afraid of compromise solutions.
Use improper deployment methodology
War is an area of chance: only in this stranger is it given such a wide scope, because nowhere does human activity come into contact with it with all its sides so much as in war.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
An error that occurs when no difference is made between projects for, for example, SAP and RPA.
Robotization gives the maximum effect where we spend much less time and effort on it than on “full-fledged” automation. And this means that it is necessary with all our power to ensure that robotization is as fast as possible, and that labor costs for it are significantly and provably smaller than other solutions for the same task.
Most often, in large enterprises, this problem is expressed in the fact that any IT decision is made to run through a number of checks and approvals, and the entire project is driven using a “heavy” development methodology, such as RUP.
This approach, which has proven itself to create and support large solutions, fails on projects where the whole cycle should last 2-3 months. If the process can be automated two to three times faster than all the necessary approvals are required, you need to change the approach, ensure that the robots can pass the checks faster, accompany them with a smaller amount of documentation, etc.
Where the Agile approach is already used, at least for some products, it makes sense to find out whether the development of robots can also be attributed to this category.
Where everything is still “serious”, you need to spend a lot of time on learning and explaining what robots are, what they eat and why they need special attention.
To underestimate the competencies and resources necessary for the full implementation
If the army does not have a wagon train, it dies; if there is no food, it perishes; if there are no stocks, it dies.
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War"
The consequence of the fact that the pilot who is easily given creates a "dizzy with success," and it seems that you can go further from victory to victory, without putting serious effort to it.
To create a pilot, usually download a free version of the platform from the Internet (for example, UiPath Community Edition or RPA Express ) and start creating. By a team of two or three people, it is quite realistic to make and launch the first process in a couple of months. But for a large company this is not enough, we need dozens of processes that robotize business processes in different areas, running on many different computers, servers, virtual machines.
Getting a full-fledged implementation is impossible without gathering the backbone of the team, training specialists, obtaining the necessary resources, etc. etc. So, all this needs to be thought out, prepared and coordinated in advance, you need to find those to whom the task will be really interesting.
Often the complexity of this task is underestimated in the initial stages of the project, which, further, leads to unpleasant disappointments.
Incorrectly calculate the effect of the introduction
From time immemorial, only great victories led to great results.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
An error occurs when the effect of PRA implementation is calculated based only on the obvious metric - “FTE savings”. The problem here is that in our reality, where salaries in the regions are comparable to the cost of a robot license, this metric fails, leaving most of the processes behind the line, when a positive ROI can be obtained in 9-12 months (in the US or Western Europe, this is usually about 6 months).
Here you need to understand that the effectiveness of RPA is measured in a more complex way than just saving man-hours. It is necessary to take into account the fact that the processes begin to work much faster, unloading the multi-week “waiting lists”, and that the percentage of errors that were previously introduced by the “human factor” and the inability to add additional checks to the long and complex process is reduced.
There are even more difficult measurable indicators, such as increased employee satisfaction with their work (which means less layoffs, which means less pressure on HR), improved customer relationships (their requests are processed faster and without errors), better process controllability and many other factors.
In the short term, it is difficult to create a model for calculating the efficiency of the RPA, which will fully take into account all these factors, but this does not mean that it does not need to be pursued and that such a model, although incomplete or preliminary, should not exist from the first days of the robotization program.
By the way, when calculating the cost it is taken into account that the robot works 24x7, does not get sick, does not occupy a place in the office, it does not have to pay taxes and deductions to the pension fund, etc. - it turns out that the cost of the robot is quite comparable with the cost of the employee. This means that real people should bring real benefits by doing interesting work, rather than shifting documents from one folder to another.
Do not take care of the involvement of key employees of the company
The military must obey politicians.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
If decision makers do not understand what RPA is, why it is needed and why the company is engaged in it, it will not be possible to go far along the path of robotization.
It is often underestimated the need for a coherent strategy for the implementation of RPA, involving all levels of the company, from top management to key performers.
This is especially important at the initial stage, when the program has not yet recommended itself, and it is necessary to engage in its popularization.
You need to enlist support from above: for the company to publicly support the introduction of robots, this was discussed at general meetings, divisions were set automation goals, etc. But support is also needed from the bottom: employees must understand that robots do not rob them of their work, but take boring routine tasks, do not interfere in solving problems, but simplify their solution. The IT team must understand that their participation is not just necessary, but also necessary, the business must understand that they have a decisive word in how the robotization of their processes will be carried out, the SC must be sure that the robots do not create a gaping hole in safety and etc.
In general, explaining to important people of the company why they need RPA and how it will help them is perhaps the most difficult, but the most important thing the team will have to do.
Forget to make a clear plan
The most difficult thing is to better prepare the victory; this is the subtle merit of a strategy for which it rarely receives praise.
Karl von Clausewitz, "On War"
Moving forward, not quite understanding why, where and how we are going to do this is a frequent, but, unfortunately, from no less important problem.
Strategic development involves a clearly defined goal, which the entire RPA team must share and which must be coordinated with decision makers.
Such a development should have reference points rigidly tied to the time “by 2020, make 10 processes”, “by the end of Q2'19 to robotize HR processes by 50%”, “create a library of at least 50 reusable components this month”, “ transfer 20% of automated tests in development to the RPA platform. ”
There must be metrics: NPS, FTE savings, robot recycling, and so on.
Must be defined (or planned to determine) the role in the team, the criteria for selecting processes, criteria for measuring success and more.
All this, in aggregate, will help not only to understand whether the implementation of RPA in a company moves well or badly, but also to convincingly explain this to the concerned authorities or the management of related departments. It will be much easier for people to participate in the initiative if they can clearly and clearly explain what it does and how.
So, if desired, the second quote for this item can safely put the unforgettable
It is better to lose a day, but then fly for five minutes.
G. Grif, "Wings, legs and tails"
Finally
RPA can be a powerful tool to assist in the digital transformation of a company, and therefore the strategy of using robotization should be part of the overall digitalization strategy.
But in order for robots to help the company move along the path to a digital future, it’s not enough to say the magic words “RPA”, “ML”, “OCR”, you also need to work a little bit to have a friendly, motivated and purposeful team behind these words with a clear plan of action and support at all levels of the organization, from management to employees.
Of course, it is not easy, of course, in real life, the abyss on the path sometimes seems insurmountable.
But, completing the article with another quote from Karl Clausewitz:
Without courage, an outstanding commander is unthinkable ... We consider her the first condition for a commanding career.
Source links
In preparing the article used materials
- CSO (Strategy Director) UiPath Vargha Moayed "From pilot to full scale RPA deployment"
- Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz , About War
- Sun Tzu , Art of War
- Pictures of robots from Mobile Fighter G Gundam
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442458/
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