The 10 Step Roadmap to Scaling Automation Part2: Accelerating digital transformation

Author: Anil Bhasin, Managing Director and Vice President – India and South Asia, UiPath

In part 1, we discussed the importance of involving stakeholders at various levels. Part two takes us through the requirement of a Centre of Excellence, skill development, and management models that can help further accelerate digital transformation.

Shivani Agarwal, Director - Process Automation, Xerox Corporation talked about elevating the organisation’s RPA to the next level. She said, “At Xerox, we are done with several basic automation, and a lot of RPA use cases are already live. With employee and user feedback and successful smaller pilots, we would now like to scale to a level where we can start transforming bigger and complex business processes.”

6. Invest early in building skills: It is imperative to develop capacity and capability in your work force to aid the process of scaling automation. Plan and provide regular training and certification opportunities and encourage active participation in industry forums to help employees maintain their RPA skill and knowledge. Leverage the multitude of training academy and certification resources available. Several are available free of cost.

7. Accelerate New Use Case Discovery: The ability to discover new use cases is a crucial building block to create momentum in the automation scaling process. The vital element here is to identify and prioritise the correct process that can build a good business case is also easy to implement. Charting out the end-to-end process with an interlay of the system landscape will help stakeholders identify automation opportunities that can add value to the organisation.

Rizvi Kareem, Head of IT, Citizens Development Business Finance PLC said, “Our RPA journey started in 2019 and has been transformative. It can be seen in our 24/7 back-office operations, doorstep service, and advanced remote working facilities that helped run operations in this pandemic. Each deployment led to discovering new processes and business cases across functions that could be automated.”

8. Build a federated Centre of Excellence (CoE) model: A CoE can facilitate synergy in efforts by consolidating the multitude of projects running in silos. This model can provide the expertise and support required to help operationalize the vision of scaling more effectively. All of this will lead to greater business impact and rapid scaling at an enterprise level.

As Shobha Singh, Head Digital Transformation, Mizuho Bank, puts it, “This year we started a global CoE in India and now plan to take RPA to the next level with centralized automation, giving a seamless experience to users. Our key focus will be around error handling and exception management processes especially on OCR and exploring cognitive capabilities.”

9. Establish the Governance Model: Partnering with the IT team and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at early stages of the project can help establish the right risk and compliance governance with internal audit and compliance teams. Further, ensure that your governance and controls roadmap is aligned with all relevant stakeholders, and it is overseen by a steering group to ensure adherence.

Sekar S, General Manager – IT & Chief Information Officer, Karur Vysya Bank ltd says, “Automation is a journey. With every solution that is rolled out, we need to ensure that business and IT roadmaps are aligned, and address risk mitigation and compliance measures."

10. Take a Leveraged Approach to Sustain Automation Operating Model: When shifting toward a cross-organization model while collaborating across organizational boundaries, it is useful to consider a leverage of strong partners who can bring capability in specific functional and industry related domains. Adding this to an organisation’s strategy and capacity can help expand footprint without direct investment while also saving on the lead time required to create a new talent pool. This can accelerate progress and provide agility in responding to unexpected escalation in demands or cutbacks inherent in an uncertain business and geopolitical environment.

Automation provides the opportunity for organisations to further organisational and customer experience. It has witnessed transformative changes to existing processes and contributed to massive return on investments. The roadmap is not definitive but continues to evolve with experience and discovery.

Disclaimer: Content Produced by UiPath