Process Assessment
The goal of process assessment phase is to conduct an initial assessment of the candidate process and surface necessary information to determine whether the process can be automated what the benefit will be.
The initial process assessment should answer – as quickly as possible – whether the potential opportunity is a good candidate for automation or not. Follow the below steps to ensure a consistent approach when doing an assessment:
- Create a Process Analysis Template listing the parameters and observations which will help determine the automation feasibility, implementation effort and potential benefit for each process being analyzed.
- Insights from the assessment should be used to answer the below:
- Can the process be automated?
- Should the process be automated?
- What is the benefit opportunity?
Delivering Process Assessment Workshops
Normally this stage is delivered through workshops with process owners and subject matter experts and is coordinated by the Head of RPA or Process Analysts. People from the business who manage the process or are currently executing the process are best placed to talk through it in more detail.
It is vital that the right people are in these workshops as you will be collecting more detailed information on how each process works. Typically, you will be capturing the high-level process and details such as frequency, complexity, volume and where the data comes from.
Workshops tend to be 1-2 hour sessions working with the process SMEs to map the processes on a whiteboard. The focus is on process timings, number of steps, complexity and the number and type of target applications.
Below is an example approach to mapping potential process opportunities to help identify which of these processes can be taken through to the next stage. Not only will this enable you to identify appropriate process opportunities, but it will also highlight processes that could be considered for future automation, but might need to be parked for the time-being.
The Process Assessment Tool is a web-based solution that qualifies and scores processes in terms of automation-readiness and ease-of-implementation—with an estimate of cost savings and hours returned to the business—so you know which processes to automate in order to achieve the biggest value. Again and again.