What you need to know about the adoption of RPA in a company
I recently spoke with Andrei Ghiorghiu, certified trainer of UiPath, about what RPA technology can do for a company. We continue the discussion about RPA and go into details about the costs involved in implementing RPA, the steps necessary for the adoption of this technology within a company, but also about the most common mistakes.
What are the costs involved in RPA technology?
The costs of RPA implementations are not high and come with a great advantage — they provide an extremely simple way to calculate the traditional ROI that underpins any business case in the corporate world. When we can measure a process and know what is the time spent in it, we very easily get to the figures that show us the cost generated by that process. When it comes to robot costs, here we are talking about a few categories. First of all, we have the cost of the license, because these robots work on a licensed computer system.
It also requires a person to implement the process and a team to actually do the development. Often, this cost is absorbed into the company by internal automation teams. At the same time, there is also a maintenance cost, because any development in the field of IT entails the need to maintain that software in the long term.
An infrastructure cost should also be mentioned because, just as for a new teammate we consider buying a laptop, for a robot we will also have to have a virtual machine in which to do its work. From experience, I find that a realistic ROI happens somewhere under 6 months, which is pretty fantastic for an IT development. And that's what I think happens because the development time is much shorter than for a traditional process. Developing an ERP takes much more than a robot transferring data from one system to another.
Can you give us a concrete example of the costs involved?
It is very important to understand that robots are highly custom pieces of software. Thus, the same robot doing the same activity can have a different cost for two companies. That's because the process it replaces can be more complex or take into account multiple applications.
Specifically, if the accounting department of Company A receives electronic invoices from partners and enters them with the accounting software without taking too many steps, we will have a certain cost. At the same time, company B, which receives invoices in photo or physical format, must enter them into an accounting program and other management software. Thus, it is obvious that we are talking about greater complexity and a completely different cost.
So we have seen robots implemented that have total costs of up to 5,000 euros, but also robots that have been developed for non-profit organizations with costs below 1,000 euros. We have also seen robots implemented for extremely complicated processes that have replaced a huge number of hours in the work of human resources and that have cost more than 10,000 euros.
What are the steps necessary to make an RPA adoption in a company with at least 20-30 employees?
First of all, we need to understand the technology. Management needs to be aware of what this technology can do.
Then there is a need for a digitization strategy that needs to be supported by several roles. We are talking about a Project Manager or a Business Analyst — a person who is dedicated to this effort and has the necessary business understanding. It also needs to be able to know where and how robots should be used. From this point, you either start building roles and a development team internally, or you can test within the strategy with an external implementer.
When you have a few robots and you can measure internally what benefits this technology brings, it becomes a little more complicated because you need a long-term strategy.
What types of companies or departments need RPA?
The easiest way for a company is to make an assessment and see where it has the most human resources sitting in front of a computer. The financial-accounting department is the most potent in terms of efficiency when it comes to automation. But for a human leasing company, the HR area is certainly much more generous.
For most companies in operations there are a lot of interesting processes, and for an outbound sales company, it is obvious that the sales area is the one that comes first.
RPA, in general, is industry agnostic. Rather, once we understand that it automates any kind of process, as long as it is repetitive and can be drawn on a process map, then we realize that it is not industries or departments that dictate the potential, but rather the number of resources that do the same process on a daily basis. And for every company this is likely to happen in a different department.
What are the most common challenges faced by companies implementing RPA?
The biggest problem I see now in the market regarding the implementation of RPA comes from insufficient preparation of the implementation strategy. Most companies go straight into practice and put people through RPA trainings, expecting them to deliver some automation that is beneficial to the company.
In most situations, in the first phase, this happens successfully, because this is how RPA works. After this step, the traditional pitfalls begin to emerge, which a consulting partner can avoid.
When you start building robots you get excited. You build 10 — 20 robots that replace various tasks through the company. The people who built them, if they were not well trained, built some robots that are very functionally powerful, but unfortunately have some gaps in the way the code was written.
Therefore, more maintenance is needed. You can wake up over 20 processes that the time that the development team could use to develop new solutions is encumbered by far too many maintenance tasks. Then the costs of RPA, although they could be easily avoided, go to the maintenance area. And it's an effort that's becoming increasingly cumbersome and burdening the IT infrastructure. It is just one of the examples of mistakes in strategy that a company can make.
How do you see the future in terms of RPA?
The figures show that year-on-year the RPA market is growing considerably and I do not expect this to stop in the coming period. That's because we're noticing that the software ecosystem is getting more and more complex. Every company has more and more tools that specifically solve a problem.
If until a few years ago we were used to seeing a software like Salesforce that would solve a large part of the needs that a company has in the area of data management, now we see that in addition to it we still have 20 plugins that we use.
The same goes for the HR area. If before it was just an HR software, now we have one for talent acquisition, one for administration, etc. The more the specialization of solutions advances, the more this need increases. RPA is exactly that, a middleware that facilitates this transfer of information from one system to another easily.
Andrei Ghiorghiu is a certified UiPath trainer with more than five years of experience in RPA project development and over 10 years in business management and analysis. You can meet Andrei at the RPA Business analyst course and follow him on Linkedin or on his Youtube channel.
