Robotic Process Automation (RPA) strategy: How to create a successful plan
- Today’s robotic process automation software lets you quickly launch a bot to handle a repetitive process. But RPA needs an overarching strategy as you scale it
Source | enterprisersproject.com | Kevin Casey
Usability is a key battleground in the heated competition among robotic process automation (RPA) software vendors. And it’s not just a website look-and-feel thing. Rather, the idea here is that RPA adoption – which multiple signs suggest is about to soar – will depend mightily on non-programmers being able to create and deploy bots to automate common business processes.
That’s led to RPA software vendors offering drag-and-drop tools for creating bots and other features. Companies can do a pilot, or even a longer-term project, without necessarily heaping new requirements onto their software developers’ plates. There’s a push among these vendors to create “low-code” or “no-code” development tools so that business analysts and others more oriented to process than to, say, Python or Go, can do the hands-on work of using software to improve efficiency.
Why you need an RPA strategy
Prince Kohli, CTO at Automation Anywhere, says that RPA implementations can be a matter of weeks, not months or years. He attributes that to the growth of RPA platforms designed for business users, as well as preconfigured bots for commonly automated processes, which can also trim lead time to deployment.
Automation Anywhere is one vendor with a “bot store,” the RPA equivalent of an app store that includes preconfigured bots for common tasks and use cases. It includes, for example, a free finance and accounting bot with an inarguably simple raison d’etre: Remove blank rows from Excel spreadsheets. If you’re looking for a choice example of a task that’s “so mundane as to tread on boring” – another way of saying it might be a suitable candidate for RPA – your search is over.
