To get rolling on your automation journey, you need to prove out automation’s value to the organization with a strong proof of concept (PoC), build out your initial team and your technology foundations, and move out to capture the best initial opportunities.
Here’s what’s involved.
Get the white paperCompanies don’t often jump into automation with both feet—they want to test the waters first. So if you want to move automation forward in your company, you’ll need to prove out its value.
A good way to demonstrate the power of automation is to complete a PoC. Make sure it focuses on a specific process and pain point, and clearly demonstrates how RPA can improve efficiency, throughput, and overall performance.
Tell everyone—particularly senior management and the C-Suite—about your great PoC results, so that you can secure the commitments you’ll need to establish your initial automation center of excellence (CoE) and move forward on additional projects.
In Stage 1, you’ll want to lay the groundwork for a scaled-up automation effort.
Stage 1 is when many organizations establish an automation CoE to take responsibility for developing, deploying, managing, and measuring automation projects across the enterprise. (Some companies disperse automation specialists into different functional areas—but we believe a CoE makes scaling and end-to-end automation much easier and recommend it as a best practice).
Get started with a small number of skilled RPA developers and perhaps an implementation manager. As your successful track record grows, so will your team, expanding to include more RPA developers and implementation managers, plus solutions architects, business analysts, and more.
Now’s the time to clarify who does what, the way automation projects get done, the selection criteria you’ll use to build your pipeline, and the documentation you’ll need to move forward. Also, take the time to set out your plan for maintaining quality and measuring impact.
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Spend an hour learning best practices for planning, implementing and managing your first automations from a company that’s been there and done that: Volkswagen Financial Services.
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Learn how this South African IT solutions, products, and services company embarked on its RPA journey—and ended up with results like reducing a 4-hour process to a 3-minute one...
If you’re committed to a full-scale RPA journey that ends in organizational transformation, you’ll need an automation platform that can move you from discovering RPA opportunities to building automations to managing and measuring them. (In other words, the capabilities we’ve built into the UiPath Platform):
Discover automation opportunities powered by AI and your people
Build automations quickly, from the simple to the advanced
Manage, deploy, and optimize automation at enterprise scale
Run automations through robots that work with your applications and data
Engage people and robots as one team for seamless process collaboration
Measure operations and performance to align with business outcomes
You’ve laid the foundation and built your team. Now, it’s time to build your automation pipeline and start capturing its best opportunities.
Building a great pipeline becomes much easier when you have technology to help you crowdsource ideas, analyze processes to find opportunities across the enterprise, and help you prioritize the most promising projects. (Yes, it exists; check out Automation Hub to learn more).
Make sure your first projects have high ROI that’s relatively easy to capture, so you continue to build a track record of success.
During this first stage, it’s a good idea to formalize the automation initiative by obtaining an executive sponsor and establishing a steering committee to provide support, resources, oversight, and governance.
This group will need ongoing proof that your automation efforts are resulting in higher productivity, efficiency, and ROI gains. So this is the time to agree on an RPA scorecard and set up your measurement approaches.
Webinar
Companies that successfully outsourced application maintenance work realized they could bring similar savings to business operations.
Success Story
Learn how this South African IT solutions, products, and services company embarked on its RPA journey—and ended up with results like reducing a 4-hour process to a 3-minute one.
Read nowSee how real-world businesses have taken their own automation journey—and arrived at new ways to make customers happier, improve employee satisfaction and efficiency, and leapfrog their competition.