In this article, our only focus would be on things to consider while designing an effective RPA Operating Model for your organization.
Post Contents
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
Below are some sample organizational models, Choose the best that suits your organization requirement
- Business unit/Division Specific
- Federated
- 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!