OK, you know what RPA is and what benefits it can bring you, but not really sure how this applies to your business?
You’re in luck, we’ve got you covered with this short description on what makes a business process suitable for automation!
The general steps you should take when considering a process to automate are the following:
- Process nomination/ideation
- Process assessment
1 Process nomination
What you first need to do is ideate different processes within your organisation that could be interesting to automate. In short, any high-volume, business-rules-driven, repeatable process qualifies for automation. To come up with this list of candidate processes, it’s best to do business analysis and talk to domain experts within your organisation.
To help you with that, here are some useful examples of various use cases and their suitability for RPA:
Source: UiPath
2 Process Assessment
After you’ve come up with a few ideas, you can evaluate each process by scoring it according to the point system explained in this section.
Don’t worry—instead of doing this manually, you can download our assessment Excel file and do this in a few minutes!
To assess a process, you should look into 3 areas:
- Feasibility: Is it feasible i.e. possible to do?
- Complexity: How costly will it be to implement?
- Potential savings: How much will we save by implementing it?
Let’s look into those areas in more detail.
2.1 Feasibility
Some processes should just be handled by humans (until we have general AI at least). So consider how stable and standardised your process is before starting development:
Rule or judgement based?
Is the process
- completely rule-based (5 points)
- some judgement is involved (3 points)
- it’s mostly judgement involved? (1 point)
Input
Is the input to the process
- structured (e.g. table that is always of the same structure) (5 points)
- a mix of structured and unstructured (3 points)
- totally unstructured (e.g. customer enquiry in the text) (1 point)
Process stability
How often do you expect the process to change? Is it
- stable - almost no changes (5 points)
- relatively stable - sporadic changes (3 points)
- unstable - changes are expected to happen frequently (1 point)
= Suitability result
Sum your points for the section to get your total feasibility score. Then compare the number to these guidelines to see if it’s suitable to automate:
- >=12: suitable for RPA
- between 6 and 12: suitable with modifications
- <6: not suitable for RPA