Key Takeaways and Highlights from

December 1 – 2, 2016, Braselton, GA

Hi there! I’m Rochelle Hood,

your Community Manager for

BackgroundLast week at the second SSON’s North American summit dedicated to RPA in shared services this year, it was impressive to note the growth since the July event in the number of organisations in attendance who have moved from discovery / purely educational stage to the planning stage.

The content shared provided guidance on establishing an operating model for implementation, support and management of RPA capabilities. Infusing RPA as a tool into continuous improvement programs was also an area of focus among many organisations.

Panel discussions and practitioner presentations included insights into the stages of building an RPA framework comprised of completing a ‘fit’ assessment, planning and managing a successful pilot, and considerations for maintenance and support going forward.

The following are the key takeaways and highlights from the summit’s chairman, John Willmott, CEO of NelsonHall, and myself.

Background

1In your business case, suggested

practice not to equate savings to FTEs. Instead, focus on time savings and

efficiency gains. Conduct time studies to establish measure and also use this metric

to prioritise items on the request list.

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2RPA is a tool to apply to the

change needs of your enterprise and to solve business problems– start with this in your approach,

selection of processes and measures.

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3Realise you have a new role as

sales, marketing and public relations to educate stakeholders.

Be prepared to be a broken record, sharing the RPA story over and over again wide across the organisation.

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4Utilisation of cute robots or

humanise transition to robotics by naming your ‘bots’ within the initial

change management process. However, be sure everyone is aware in

the end that it is software, not a machine.

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Involve vital stakeholders early and don’t underestimate the roles that risk, legal, information security and internal audit play in the strategy, planning and adoption process.

Get them involved early to avoid a stall in your pilot or proof of concept.

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6Develop a strong partnership

with HR and your internal communications teams

to aide with the change management plan and efforts.

7Tools must be easily understood by the

business – there’s no reason for learning new technology to be feared.

Seize the opportunity to select tools that are easy to use and develop.

Shared services can now shift the paradigm of selecting a tool and throwing it over the wall to IT by leveraging Process Engineers

within the business and partnering with the development operations teams in IT.

8RPA is a natural fit with

shared services as we are the process people, the

efficiency people and the ones who make people’s lives easier.

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9RPA is a definite fit when you don’t have one ERP for whole company. Recognise it may be a ‘pot hole’ filler

to more easily fix gaps and lack of integration between systems versus

waiting on long, expensive IT projects to fill the gaps.

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10Use case videos

are powerful to generate buy in and support change

management.

11 Align Continuous Improvement (CI) and automation.

RPA is one tool.

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12“It’s amazing what people are

inspired to do when you take the waste out of the process.”

Once you show employees how RPA will remove mindless, mundane tasks

from their day, the excitement catches on like wildfire.

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13Interesting relationship

with IT – need them on your side to industrialise

the scale (can do one Proof of Concept (POC) without them); keep them informed if you do the POC, get on and do it; then

get them involved with videos, governance.

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Education: Senior managers think you’re going

to bring in something with mechanical arms and legs. Tell

them what RPA really is.

15It’s reasonable to achieve 20%

automation savings over 3 years;

further on in your journey you should be looking at around 50%.

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16Standard IT test data and

scenarios won’t do it. Create a scenario to run, stop, run

and have a person press the button before anything goes into production.

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17Create a COE based on a Subject

Matter Expertise (SME) model and a structure that works best for you.

Developers can come from IT, operations or process environments.

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18Change management works both ways. IT and shared services both

need to keep each other informed. IT have application changes going on which are important for your project

team to be away of.

A sound practice is to complete a joint technology roadmap with automation as

a part of it.

19Monitoring “bots”:

Operations need to manage the bots and treat them just like

employees for reporting, scheduling and comparing

productivity.

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