Important considerations before hiring digital workers
By Josh Painter
If you’re planning on using robotic process automation (RPA) to bring transformational change to your company, your first step is to pick the processes within your business that will be effectively automated with the help of a digital workforce.
Then, there’s a lot of checklist items to work through to make sure your business is ready to set up RPA software. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! This blog will guide you through some important things to consider before hiring your digital workers.
Engage your subject matter experts (SMEs)
The best place to start when determining the right processes for RPA automation is to meet with the subject matter experts (SMEs) from your different business units to understand where their staff spends time on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis.
By working with your SMEs, they’ll help you understand the pain points within your business based on direct feedback from those on their teams running various daily processes. This will provide you with a variety of RPA process candidates that have a high return on investment (ROI) potential, as they’re coming directly from your SMEs.
Create your documentation
During discussions with your business SMEs, it’s also good to figure out what process candidates have helpful guides or documentation created. RPA developers will need a step-by-step overview to understand each of your business processes to complete basic process documentation.
If you don’t have any documentation created for a potential process, it’s a good idea to have the SME get some information written down for you to use and keep. This is a good idea even if RPA doesn’t end up being a solution for that process as sometimes business documentation does not exist.
Analyze your processes
Another important part of picking process candidates is to get a number of tasks within each process you’re considering and how long it takes your employees to complete each task. This may change month to month with changing workloads so it’s a good idea to get a year’s worth of data to really make sense of it. All this data will be the main driver in helping you figure out the possibility of using RPA to automate each process for the best return on investment.
Ask lots of questions
Other helpful questions you can ask when picking potential process for RPA automation are:
- Is the process recurring? Daily, monthly, annual, or ad-hoc processes all have different considerations.
- Are there clear business rules that define the process? These business rules will provide important decision points for RPA and will help you figure out any cases that may need a manual review.
- Is the data required for the process defined and structured? You need to understand what data sources the process use/produces to help determine how much time you’d need for RPA development.
There are other questions and considerations to think about when picking processes, but this gives you a good start for discussing RPA with an implementation partner. Getting all the data and information we’ve talked about here will help you get the best return on your investment during the initial phases of RPA adoption.
About the author
Josh is a Blue Prism Consultant and our Lead Blue Prism Developer. In his role, he’s involved in all day to day activities for Blue Prism. Throughout his career, he’s always been involved with reviewing business processes and notes how fulfilling it is to be able to help automate these business processes to make work easier. Growing up in Colorado, Josh enjoys spending his free time in the mountains and traveling to new locations with his family.
