How to Identify RPA Opportunities

Large companies and SMEs across all industries benefit from robotic process automation (RPA). Across departments, you'll find a significant amount of time-consuming routine tasks that employees don't enjoy, making the potential need and value of RPA undeniable. As a non-invasive, low-code technology, RPA holds the promise of rapid deployment with fast results.

Knowing this, you need to know how to approach implementing an RPA program at your company. Before implementation comes analysis. Identify processes that are truly suitable for automation to get the maximum return from your investment in RPA.

Demand check: RPA potential across departments

Your automation journey begins with a walk through the business departments in search of potential RPA use cases. Take a look at your company's processes from the following perspective: “A good candidate [for RPA] is a task that is a bottleneck in a larger process that may take hours of manual work.” - Dennis Gannon, VP of Research at Gartner

These are all the time-consuming, often deadline-bound tasks that bore or stress your qualified employees. These tasks are also frequently prone to human error and need to be reworked. They cost too much, tie up valuable resources in your company, and block value-adding activities.

Check your departments for monotonous tasks that are good candidates for RPA. For example, after deducting payroll, time recording, personnel file management, and organizational tasks in the context of recruiting, onboarding, and offboarding , your HR staff hardly has any time left for leadership coaching and personnel development. In purchasing and finance, the day-to-day operational business of comparing supplier conditions, writing proposals, booking invoices, or creating reports prevents a strategic focus. And your IT team is supposed to be driving your business forward with innovative solutions, but instead spends all day in a traditional administrative role – assigning passwords, installing software, or applying patches.

Process automation demand is potentially everywhere – so why not quickly implement an RPA solution and let the bots take some work off your employees’ shoulders? It’s an appealing idea, but a suboptimal approach.

RPA isn't just a tool – it’s a lever for process optimization

Company-driven processes are frequently not strategically implemented top-down. Rather, they evolved bottom-up in daily business and sprawled wildly over the years. The very departments that like to initiate RPA projects and are supposed to benefit from automation maintain numerous highly individualized and proven, but often not very efficient workflows.

"If you digitize a shitty process, you end up with a shitty digital process." Take that popular statement, replace "digitize" with "automate," and the equation is still true. RPA initiatives that are simply slapped on top of the existing process landscape are not realizing the full potential of the technology:

“[In] many companies […] RPA implementations support the “as-is” process, with no improvement or examination of the current process steps that are automated. As a result, they may achieve modest savings, but […] will miss out on opportunities to dramatically improve process outcomes, quality, costs, and cycle times.”

So even if you initially discovered a promising automation potential across your organization and would really love to start RPA right away, step back and analyze what might happen. Don't just give your employees a low-code tool to automate some tasks. Take a mindful step back and use the introduction of RPA as an opportunity for process reengineering:

“The companies we have seen achieve the greatest success in deploying RPA are those who combine it with the disciplines of process redesign and continuous improvement. […] RPA in which the “P” stands for process improvement or innovation is a much more valuable tool than simple task automation.”

Thomas H. Davenport and David Brain: Before Automating your Company’s Processes, Find Ways to Improve them

As-is-assessment: Documenting processes

As a basis for subsequent optimization, map the current process landscape first. You’ll most likely find that there is no (consistent) documentation available. There may be single workflow descriptions scattered in drawers or digital folders, in Word, in Excel, in Visio, as free-text descriptions, as click paths – and most often already outdated. As a rule, the up-to-date process knowledge is stored in your employees’ heads.

Bring this knowledge to light, and take another spin through your company; determine how processes are actually executed in your organization. Document the processes in your company on three levels:

Core processes contain all activities that directly add value: The manufacture of a product or the provision of a service. They typically run across different departments. E.g. The order-to-cash process ranges from a customer’s inquiry to their payment posting. This affects sales, warehousing, production, shipping, and accounting. Conduct a workshop with all department heads involved and map a higher-level view of the entire core process.
Supporting processes are sub-processes of the core process: These are typically department-related, e.g. order processing in sales or invoicing in accounting. In workshops with department managers and employees, record the logical sequence of the individual process steps, the actors involved, and the required exchange of goods or information.
Tasks: Look at the individual process steps in detail, e.g. invoicing. Zoom into the task level and use questionnaires or employee interviews to record the sequence of analog or digital tasks that employees perform to complete a process step. Make sure to document the duration and frequency of the activities. This is the level at which people actually work, and at which the RPA bots will take over suitable tasks in the future.

Workflow visualization: Modeling processes

Visualize the high-level overall processes and assigned sub-processes. Apply the standard business process model notation (BPMN) 2.0. BPMN models processes as a graphical flowchart and helps to visualize the process logic including involved actors, resources, dependencies, and activities in a comprehensible way.

Pizza process