By Gurdeep Singh, Automation COE lead at Tryg
Gurdeep on stage doing a hybrid presentation at the Boye Aarhus 20 conference
Lean has been the need of the hour as more and more organisations are adopting robotics process automation (RPA) and maturing in their respective space.
By Lean RPA we mean, optimal utilization of all available resources whether they are licenses or VDI/VM or application maintenance teams or monitoring resources and visualization tools. Eventually the expectations is less of operating cost, resilient setup, lower response time, transparency and governance.
While many organisations have historically spent quite some time developing internal resources which can help them attaining Lean RPA for long some major players in the market have gone ahead and provided COTS (Commercial Of The Shelf) solutions which can be easily adopted and deployed for enhancing operations and helping in driving efficient and effective Lean Operations.
The next question comes is what does these tools have to offer in general, now some have them out of the box and some are in the process of enhancing these tools in their current and future version upgrades and roadmaps.
However on a broader scale they are revolving around the same parameters and end objectives.
I will refrain from comparing these tools since that’s more an in depth discussion on technical setups and speed to execution with end objective and organization priorities.
How can lean tools help us in achieving lean RPA
Let’s talk about how can these tools help us:
Smart Orchestration: This means customer first approach, classically we have been scheduling based on process requirements and which were static and incase of variations, operations get impacted and response time to resolutions during such situation was high and our approach to resolution was reactive rather than proactive. Tools offer smart orchestration of services, task and events based on prioritization, helping in scheduling and orchestrating activities resulting in customer first approach rather than process first approach
Linear Operations: Classical RPA operations was more plan driven which is not agile but these tools gives more agility to operations resulting in meeting SLA more effectively and committing to more ownership with operations / business eventually commitment to end customers. Proactive planning and historical data helps in planning it more effectively and efficiently
Linear License Utilization: If we can orchestrate smart and operate more effectively with customer first approach then we are more effective in managing our resources and in this case its licensing. We can use are licenses approx. 50% more effectively and drive down operating cost since the automated provisioning helps us to identify idol period and allocate resources as per priorities
Controls and Self-healing for L1 and L2 incidents: RPA Operations loose valuable time and business experience tangible and non-tangible impacts due to these incidents. These tools help in identifying common incidents at infra and robots / services level and incase of occurrence it trigger the self-healing of identified issues. This also help in managing the logs with details of incidents and help the application team in rectifying them in later stages.
Transparency and Performance Management: If you can’t measure it then you can’t improve it. If it’s not transparent its all dust under the carpet. These old operational phases are so true today in RPA operations and if they exist you are miles away from Lean RPA. Tools help us in managing all performance, incident, scheduling and analysis on a click of a button to be reviewed, analyzed and shared. This brings you closer to operational commitment and transparency.
Governance: One of the core requirements from IT security and Business, leaner operations with transparency helps in managing Governance more effectively and gives us the flexibility to manage governance requirements and share details with data driven approach. Additionally you get the flexibility to secure credentials, define access hierarchies and controls, have multi tenancy and logs for analysis and controls. All this at a RPA CoE makes it more effective in operations and driving resilient robotics in an organization
Adoption Roadblocks
Now that we have seen what can be done, why it should be done and how it can be done we need to move to the other part of the story and that will be incomplete without road blocks, challenges and pitfalls to cover. Being a devil’s advocate when everything is rosy helps me in challenging the status quo and look for long term challenges which should be considered making decisions.
Infrastructure: Validate the infrastructure is aligned with your internal infrastructure, like Cloud, On-Prem or hybrid. Incase we are using multiple RPA vendors and have different infrastructure setup it might be a bit more expensive/complex to have a cross vendor environmental setup. Hence it will be good to have a good discussion with potential tool vendor to discuss this in advance and lay out potential future setup before investing heavily upfront. It will also be a good idea to involve your infra and cloud operations team.
Cross Function Technology: Most of the vendors are good with multi RPA vendor, multi tenancy and multi environment but when it comes to cross technology platforms like RPA with Power App, APIs, microservices etc. working together it needs to be evaluated and a thorough discussion with the vendors should be conducted and deployment plan should include cross technology adoption in accordance to their roadmap and your internal strategy
ROI: Solutions like these comes with cost and a wise ROI discussion and realisation should be done proactively to see what’s the right time and when you should initiate the project
When should you adopt these tools
I believe they are really helpful tool for Lean RPA, however we also need to evaluate when you should have it adopted in your Lean RPA Journey. Also how should you leverage it as a strategic tool rather than a tactical tool For short term benefit my recommendation, is to have an upfront and constructive discussion with your potential vendor regarding long term engagements, understanding their roadmaps and aligning them with your strategy.
All in all these are great tools to leaner operations, but like any other tool they have a journey which includes more linear infrastructure setup, ability to adopt cross functional technology and accelerated ROI.
Finally, if you are working at one of the vendors in this space, please do encourage RPA CoE leads to do PoCs and realise benefits at small scale and get inspired with the art of possible in the product roadmap.
Learn more about lean RPA
Some of the vendors in this space are SmartRPA, RPA Supervisor and Turbotic. Do you know of others, then please do let me know.
Many of the so-called “vanilla RPA players” (e.g. BluePrism, UiPath) have some out of the box tools which help addressing focus areas for LEAN RPA Setup, however there are improvements required to be at par with the offering in the market from specific tool providers. As usual, it all totally depends upon your appetite and strategic priorities in your own organisation to validate the best fit.
If you have comments and feedback, please do share by leaving a comment below or getting in touch directly.
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