Robotic Process Automation is best done natively, from the ground up

Here are 15 steps to follow for best Robotic Process Automation results.

1. Drive Robotic Process Automation (RPA) from the highest level in your organisation. It is imperceptive for RPA to driven as an integrated corporate project with support from all internal stakeholders. Silos MUST be broken down.
2. Establish an automation innovation group – include a change agent, business, IT, auditing and compliance representatives.
3. Identify business areas where automation makes sense and those areas that are best left to human roles.
4. Identify processes or process groups as automation candidates.
5. Design training and change management programs to ensure your employees do not see automation as a threat, rather to see it as an opportunity to learn something new and to play a different role in the business.
6. Completely re-engineer them for maximum automation effectiveness whilst adhering to governance and compliance regulations.
7. Ask probing questions and make sure the processes, business and compliance rules and data flows are not based on human design roles.
8. Remove those processes or process groups from the ERP domain and manage them within the automation domain.
9. Integrate with ERP and line of business systems where appropriate.
10. Send ALL source and result data as well as all automated process execution data to your secure big data store.
11. Use machine learning and other advanced analytics techniques to develop patterns of normal process behaviour given each possible process scenario.
12. Implement a stream analytics pipeline that will monitor every automated process in real time. Flag normal vs anomalous process behaviour and feed the machine learning engine to improve the monitoring algorithm.
13. Build visualisations to show automated transactions in progress, outcomes, statistics and to highlight potential anomalous transactions. Support the visualisations with secure database tables containing all details for auditing purposes.
14. Implement alerts for high risk anomalous process behaviour patterns.
15. Select the next process or process group and repeat until you achieve the correct balance between processes that are managed within your ERP domain and those that are automated.