An Effective RPA Operating Model

In this article, our only focus would be on things to consider while designing an effective RPA Operating Model for your organization.

Introduction

An enterprise that wants to scale with RPA technology, needs to identify and set up a robust and comprehensive industrial operating model.

RPA Operating Model

The operating model design is strongly linked to an organization’s ambition in terms of process automation. The end-to-end automation journey needs to include the below parameters:

  • Organizational Model
  • Governance
  • Technology
  • Resource and skills
  • Methods & Tools

rpa operating model

Below are some sample organizational models, Choose the best that suits your organization requirement

  1. Business unit/Division Specific
  2. Federated
  3. Centralized

Business unit/Division Specific

Organizations adopt ROI before transitioning to either a Federated or Centralized operating model.

Benefits:

  • Quick implementation of organizational objectives

Drawbacks:

  • Fragments use of people, processes, and technology
  • Cannot scale to deliver enterprise

Federated

Delivery of bot carried out by business and RPA Center of Excellence is centralized to provide best practices and guidance.

Benefits:

  • Centralized Standards
  • Localized ownership and agility
  • Scalable capability

Drawbacks:

  • Requires a high degree of coordination
  • Matured Bus on RPA implementation cannot be sufficiently leveraged

Centralized

A centralized robotics Center of excellence delivers end-to-end RPA solutions enterprise-wide.

Benefits:

  • Centralized standard and delivery
  • Scalable approach
  • Optimization of skill sets

Drawbacks:

  • Slows down highly agile Business units
  • High setup costs

Why sometimes RPA fails?

An uncontrolled RPA operating model inevitably leads to inefficient and unstable robots.

Companies that haven’t defined their operating model quickly face challenges in the management and maintenance of robots in production.

Although the RPA development phase often works well, organizations sometimes realize that RPA is not necessarily the best solution to apply or that a process should have been optimized before being robotized.

  • Forgetting business-IT collaboration
  • Relying on weak governance on RPA projects
  • Automating in a non-efficient way
  • Building on unstable, non-scalable designs

The key to lasting success

Robot management is like running a shared service center. The definition of roles and methodologies across the RPA lifecycle is essential to steer activities and coordinate stakeholders from business to transversal functions – such as risk, compliance, and security – and to IT teams.

An adapted operating model also guarantees the stability of the robots by anticipating maintenance needs related to the evolution of an organization’s legacy systems.

Below are facts to be considered:

  • Advanced planning
  • Project oversight
  • Defining success

RPA operations should also establish indicators to measure the benefits and the actual costs of robots.

These parameters must be appreciated from the upstream phases of opportunity qualification and shared with the business lines.

Indicators must also be set up for the live phase of robots to enable their monitoring and supervision, including tracking of volumes handled by robots vs. exceptions managed by humans, and processing times, etc.

Summary

  • The operating model design is strongly linked to an organization’s ambition in terms of process automation.
  • Sample organizational models are – Business unit/Division Specific, Federated, Centralized.
  • An uncontrolled RPA operating model inevitably leads to inefficient and unstable robots.
  • RPA operations should also establish indicators to measure the benefits and the actual costs of robots.

Happy Automating!

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