Robotic Process Automation: A Step-by-Step Implementation Guide

If you’re planning to scale your enterprise, you’d be remiss to overlook robotic process automation (RPA).

Forecasts show that the RPA market will grow to more than $13 billion by 2030.

And by 2023, 93% of business leaders expect to be using RPA technology to automate rote, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks.

That’s because the benefits of RPA—better accuracy, rapid cost savings, speed to value, better compliance, more engaged employees, and happier customers—outweigh any hesitancy.

But in reality, successfully executing an RPA project can be quite complex.

This guide shares the steps to implementing RPA for a future workplace powered by automation.

Common Challenges to Successful RPA Implementation

An Ernst & Young (EY) study reveals that 30% to 50% of RPA initiatives fail globally owing to various challenges. Some of the common hurdles businesses encounter include:

  • No clear vision and overall strategy
  • Employee resistance and onboarding
  • Fragmented and siloed processes
  • No stakeholder buy-in, IT readiness, and support
  • Setting unrealistic goals/high expectations
  • Rushed installation
  • No proper oversight and governance
  • Lack of production readiness
  • Unintended process outcomes
  • Shadow/unauthorized deployments
  • Inexperienced/incompetent RPA partner or vendor
  • Unskilled support and monitoring team

In the short and long run, these challenges result in delayed project timelines and increased long-term total cost of ownership (TCO).

However, the only thing worse than an imperfect RPA implementation is not implementing it at all.

The next section of this guide covers how to get started with your RPA project, including how to scope out automation opportunities and build, deploy, and maintain an RPA project.

8 Steps to Implement Robotic Process Automation

You’ve determined that RPA is suitable for your business. It’s time to make it official. Let’s look at the steps to implement RPA in your enterprise and the key considerations in each step.

1. Evaluate and List Business Processes to Automate

Most businesses likely have countless processes that represent automation opportunities. Yet, it isn’t easy to know where to start because of the many RPA use cases, which are as unique as the businesses that leverage them.

Start by identifying, evaluating, and listing the automation opportunities to ensure you get the right business outcomes faster.

Key Considerations

To gain a clearer picture of what to automate, consider processes that are:

  • Well defined and rule-based
  • Time-consuming, manual, and error-prone
  • High volume and high frequency
  • Highly organized with structured data and inputs
  • Repetitive, stable, and based on a standardized, clearly documented process that won’t undergo significant revisions soon
  • Complex and scenario-based
  • Difficult to outsource
  • Have a potentially high return on investment (ROI)

2. Choose an Implementation Partner

Once you know what to automate, you’ll need to choose the right RPA partner or vendor to implement the automation process.

It’s not always a simple task, especially with the overwhelming number of vendors and information about their RPA tools and services.

Without an expert RPA consultant, it’s easy to stumble upon tools that appear to be good fits. Leaniar’s qualified RPA experts take time to learn about your company’s unique aspects and advise you on the best RPA software to use based on your industry.

Key Considerations

Not sure how to pick the right RPA vendor? To help frame part of your choice, find a vendor that:

  • Understands your legacy system
  • Is an RPA implementation preferred partner
  • Demonstrates RPA expertise (portfolio, certifications, and meets IEEE Standards Association requirements for RPA service providers)
  • Has proven industry experience and history of successful implementations
  • Has positive customer reviews/references and a strong, active user community
  • Provides maintenance/support programs beyond the Proof of Concept (PoC)
  • Complies with regulatory requirements to help you maintain more effective legal standards
  • Can adapt to fulfill future automation needs (artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Offers a range of cost and pricing models
  • Provides integration options
  • Adheres to good documentation practices

3. Onboard the Team (Project Takeoff)

Your employees may make incorrect assumptions about RPA before implementation, some viewing it as a threat, while others may see it as an unnecessary addition to an in-house software solution.

David Zhao, Managing Director at Coda Strategy and former Deloitte digital modernization practice leader, cites improper alignment between business and IT teams and difficulty finding highly qualified resources as some of the pain points in this phase.

Taking time to onboard both the business team and vendor team ensures everyone handles the implementation efficiently for a sustainable RPA program.

“In addition to showcasing the range of benefits and scope of impact, you want to introduce the core team to best practices to manage continuous change and mobilize internal capability. Increasingly, companies are adopting design authority measures to establish solution standards and support best practices.” — Jon Knisley, Principal, Reveal Group.

Creating an RPA Center of Excellence (CoE)—a hybrid team of RPA implementation experts, innovation leaders, and enterprise architects—ensures both teams are available and improves your ability to achieve your automation goals.

Key Considerations

Not sure how to pick the right RPA vendor? To help frame part of your choice, find a vendor that:

  • The project team
  • Team availability.
  • Detailed or high-level project plans

4. Start Process Exploration

Process exploration involves an analysis of your system logs—through process mining or task mining—using data from enterprise transaction systems to:

  • Reveal what happens in your processes
  • Identify repetitive tasks and process variations
  • Help you discover process pain points and bottlenecks
  • Measure process conformance to given guidelines
  • Suggest process improvements

“RPA is not appropriate for all processes. Some processes, for example, necessitate decision-making and cognitive abilities. RPA is not a suitable fit in these situations. Process mining can ‌identify the right processes that are best suited for RPA-based automation, which makes decisions based on data rather than human inference.” — Travis Lindemoen, Managing Director, Nexus IT Group.

Key Considerations

In this phase, keep in mind factors like:

  • Your business goals or key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • The quality of event log data
  • System accesses
  • The complexity of the process/task
  • The process mining and/or task mining tool, vendor, or team

5. Start Developing Your Solution

Next up, you’ll develop your RPA solution.

This phase involves creating flowcharts to define and model the actual process you want to automate and mapping the automation dependencies (systems or regulations). This way, you can design a blueprint that helps developers understand what to automate.

From here, they’ll create automation scripts within your chosen RPA vendor’s platform and build suitable software robots for the automatable processes based on the provided guidelines.

Key Considerations

The following factors are critical to the development phase of an RPA implementation:

  • Frozen requirements and detailed timelines
  • Task prioritization
  • Common components
  • Architecture
  • Good development (coding) practices
  • System access
  • Costs
  • Exception handling
  • Licensing
  • Data security and compliance
  • Scalability

6. Test the New RPA Process

Once you’ve developed your RPA bots, test them out in the pre-production environment against different scenarios to establish whether they’re suitable for automating the processes.

If the bots are unsuitable, send them back to development to catch and fix potential errors and re-test them.

Key Considerations

Keep in mind these key factors when testing the new RPA process:

  • Inputs (test scenarios versus business rules)
  • Quality of the test data
  • Expected outcomes and any defects
  • Robot uptime and accuracy
  • Improved processes
  • Bot functionality
  • Exception handling
  • Business process flow errors
  • Environmental changes
  • Integration issues
  • End-user training

7. Deploy the RPA Process

IT operations will typically test their environment changes within a pre-production environment before committing it to production.

Once the bots are ready and suitable for automation, deploy them to perform their assigned tasks. In case of any errors or abrupt behavior, the bots will be sent back to the developers, who will re-test the bots and fix any issues they find.

Key Considerations

When deploying your RPA bots, be sure to:

  • Partner with IT to ensure they’re following the deployment process
  • Verify for missing dependencies or broken links
  • Verify production links and login credentials
  • Monitor the first few transactions
  • Support team training for proper monitoring and continuity

8. Support the RPA In Production

Maintenance involves a team monitoring and checking bots for any exceptions and taking the corrective actions needed to fix the bots or configure them appropriately.

Key Considerations

Some critical factors in the support and maintenance phase include:

  • Employee retraining on RPA technology
  • Defined success criteria
  • Change management
  • Support team availability
  • Continuous monitoring
  • Timely responses
  • Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Getting Help with RPA Implementation at Your Organization

RPA is a smart choice for most companies. But if implemented ineffectively, it can lead to risk and negatively impact your business.

Leaniar—a UiPath Gold Partner—exists to help you create an RPA implementation roadmap and solution that helps you ‌improve your business, gain a competitive edge, and deliver value to your customers and teams.

Our RPA experts will provide the technical expertise to help you dive into your existing processes to identify and prioritize automation opportunities, implement RPA sustainably and achieve digital transformation.

Book a call with Leaniar to learn how we make the RPA implementation process simple and effective while driving the most meaningful business outcomes.