Getting Started FAQs
When you are starting on your RPA journey there are a number of frequently asked questions that you will hear from various internal teams. Below we have listed some of the most common FAQs.
- Ensure that RPA is the right technology for you and initialize the project by performing a pilot to facilitate buy in from stakeholders.
- Assign a Head of RPA to evangelize the technology, raise awareness and develop executive sponsorship.
- Define a Vision for RPA and align it to corporate strategy culture.
- Automate low-hanging fruit to deliver early benefits, foster buy-in and encourage additional investment.
- Early engagement on RPA is essential, a top down approach is recommended
- Ensure a clear communications plan is in place
- Share success stories and lessons learned after each successful implementation.
- Cascade the RPA vision from the top down and champion within the adopting business areas
- Focus on human benefits and the enhancement of the employee journey
- Early engagement and education across the business will help to reduce anxiety and facilitate adoption
- Read more on achieving Business Integration here.
- Initially you will need to invest to build relevant skills, infrastructure and to establish your capability
- A small investment is required to establish a foundation capability, with the total cost of ownership reducing as you scale
- Replicate the use of objects across multiple new processes.
- Define your organizational model early. Selection should be based on the nature of your business and the culture within it
- When building your structure, consider that the model may evolve over time as your RPA capability matures
- There are many different organizational designs that companies may adopt and examples can be found in the Organization Foundation.
- This will vary from organization to organization and there is no 'one size fits all' approach
- Organizations often start out with a small core team with additional resource and mentoring provided by a partner
- In the beginning organizations often combine roles such as Developer and Process Controller, or Process Analyst and Developer
- Each organization can scale to meet the ambition of the business and this will vary from place to place.
- IT training and an IT background certainly is critical for the technical architecture skills within the COE
- IT training is less critical in process analyst/developer roles
- Blue Prism recommended training paths, material and certification paths are available at the Blue Prism University
- Anything is possible given time and budget, Blue Prism has invested many years in developing a solution which allows benefit realization quickly and cost-effectively
- Using certified partners enables you to accelerate RPA implementations and provide training to your staff as you progress through the RPA journey.
- Certification and training paths for core roles are provided in the Blue Prism University
- Check out the Foundation Training within the Blue Prism University as an initial training resource for new team members.
- Ensure that a Head of RPA is appointed to evangelize, lead and own the RPA capability
- Build a small, highly skilled COE team to lead discovery, delivery, infrastructure and service
- Your initial RPA team can perform multiple skills, however there needs to be a plan in place to scale the team and ensure that the appropriate segregation of duties is in place.
- Depending on the nature of the change the automated solution may need to be re-configured and tested
- Performing an application assessment as part of the Process Assessment phase is essential. This helps identify the frequency of application changes
- A change management process should be in place to proactively identify IT application changes that affect target applications.
- Digital Workers follow a prescribed binary path outlined by the business and defined in the process definition document. Digital Workers will not stray from their trained path.
- The Digital Worker also has a full audit trail so that every decision and action taken can be reviewed and understood if required.
- The Digital Worker can be started, stopped and controlled on demand. In addition, users can have a view of worked and pending cases.
- Ensure the COE are the gatekeepers for RPA and are responsible for setting standards and quality with the Head of RPA being accountable.
- A mature delivery methodology consisting of best practices standards and templates will ensure that everyone has the tools to automate consistently.
- Defined stage gates, Design Authority and Governance Board are essential to ensure build quality and consistency.
- A Blue Prism service team will be responsible for running and observing the status of Blue Prism processes and core components.
- Processes will have a business continuity plan in place and contacts to reach if the business continuity plan is ever required to be implemented.
- In the event of Blue Prism down time, disaster recover may be initiated.
- Blue Prism offer product support for product related issues at https://portal.blueprism.com/customer-support .
- Blue Prism is a true cross-functional tool, and can be used to automate any manual process that involves a human interacting with a computer based systems.
- Suited to high volume, time consuming repetitive and mature processes that require little human intervention.
- Choose processes that have access to high quality data, use few IT systems and expected to yield large benefits.
- A defined process discovery approach is adopted with defined tool-kits and templates.Blue Prism offer a Process Discovery Tool that is available free of charge on the portal to help with this task.
- Define an approach to identify the right processes, for the right reasons, aligned to the right business outcomes repeatedly.
- Top down approach ensures all processes are considered. A toolkit enables you to highlight hot-spots for automation that require further investigation.
- As you start off avoid complexity, compliance based processes and processes that are high risk or business critical processes.
- As you mature, embrace additional complexity, be challenged by compliance based processes and tackle processes with business criticality and increased risk.
- Establish a healthy and credible pipeline, balancing maximization of benefit, resource and re-use of objects and processes.
- The Governance Board ensures alignment to key objectives and prioritization.
- As you mature ensure that additional technology is considered and previously incubated processes are re-visited.
- The opportunity assessment approach will determine feasibility and the size of the prize within the area in scope using the Process Discovery Tool.
- Process analysts are experts in determining feasibility of process automation through RPA.
- Processes with less potential or less benefit will be added to the pipeline and prioritized accordingly.
- A well defined, stable and resilient Digital Worker has to go through a number of stages.
- Approximately 40 percent of effort is spent defining the process and designing the solution.
- Approximately 60 percent of effort is spent on build, test and deploy which is heavily dependent on complexity, re-use of object/processes and the skill-set of the delivery team.
- Implementation effort tends to decrease over time as maturity and re-use increases.
- The Digital Worker is only as good as it’s definition and testing.
- The process definition must be representative of all expected scenarios.
- All expected scenarios and outcomes must be tested and signed off to ensure that the solution functions correctly.
- The Design Authority exists to ensure that best in class design has been considered, including re-use and efficiency.
- There are regular quality control stage gates within the delivery methodology to ensure that documentation and design has been completed to standards set by the organization.
- Sign off is required by all stakeholders before going live.
- The Business is involved in the end-to-end delivery life cycle and ideally should be 100% dedicated during implementation.
- The Business helps to define the process with Process Analysts, define testing criteria and create the data. They are also responsible for ensuring the Digital Worker is performing the process correctly by validating implementation outcomes.
- Once live, the business will process cases that the Digital Worker cannot work in line with the defined exception handling procedure.
- The Digital Workforce acts autonomously, started by schedules which run digital workers at required dates and times or can be triggered manually by Control Room controllers
- Process Controllers supervise the Digital Workers and ensure that automated processes are running as required
- The Process Controllers have a defined communication channel and associated service level agreements in place.
- The Blue Prism Control Room is monitored by the Process Controllers who identify potential issues
- Initial investigation is performed by the Process Controllers using service support documentation
- If the issue cannot be triaged by the Process Controller, then the operations team will be notified and the automation team will take over.
- The Process Controller will check outstanding case volumes and ensure that the Digital Worker has enough capacity to complete the tasks, applying additional Digital Workforce if available
- Any cases that are marked as exceptions by the process will be passed to the business operations team by the agreed format and channel to be worked manually by the Digital Worker.
- Notifications in the product let the Process Controllers know that there is an issue with the process
- Notifications of terminations can be set-up in the Blue Prism solution so that the correct people can receive emails and other notifications.
- Process Controllers will be responsible for running and observing the status of Blue Prism processes and core components in the Blue Prism control room according to their service model roles and responsibilities
- Processes should have a business continuity plan in place
- In the event of Blue Prism down time, disaster recovery should be initiated if available and fail-over will commence until the component is functional.
- Software that mimics human interactions by interacting with IT applications provides graphical user interface (GUI)
- Developers configure solutions to contain human logic which enables automation of rule based processes.
- Unlike scripting, which requires training in a programming language and can be ungoverned and unsupported as “Grey IT”, Blue Prism processes can be developed with much less technical training that can be governed both by the controls within the tool and by the COE
- If the desired functionality is unavailable within the tool, code stages can be implemented within the solution that allows the utilization of the full .NET framework. However, this requires expertise within the organization for support.
There are multiple options for you to internally recharge for automation work. Below are the most common options:
- The Centre of Excellence is a cost centre and covers all costs including infrastructure, development and support. This requires an annual budget.
- Business units are charged by the COE for development work and the ongoing cost of the platform and support. Normally based on utilization.
- Business units are charged by the COE for development work, but the COE covers the cost of the platform and ongoing support.
- Business units perform development but are charged by the COE for the platform and ongoing support. This might be on a monthly utilisation or fixed fee basis.
- Business units fund development, plus the cost for infrastructure and support. This is most common where a unit needs to operate separately from the rest of the business. Otherwise there is limited economy of scales.
Blue Prism’s Success Accelerator program combines various levels of mentorship and access to our Expert Services, Technology Ecosystem and Certified Partners based on the size and maturity of your digital workforce operations.