Center of Excellence Part 2 - First Steps in Building Scalable RPA
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This is part two of a three-part webinar series, Building Your Automation Center of Excellence. Your robotic process automation (RPA) implementation is only as good as its technological foundation. Making the right choices about systems and infrastructure will set the stage for rapid growth and prevent issues down the road. To enable a successful implementation, you must allocate certain technical resources, tools, and processes. In this 30-minute on-demand webinar, Pat Cameron, Director of Automation Technology at HelpSystems, discusses: -Building a foundation for performance -Strategies for connectivity and integration -Configuring bot and workflow templates for governance and scale -Technical best practices, including multiple environments, security and governance, capacity planning, and analytics
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Center of Excellence Part 2 - First Steps in Building Scalable RPA
- 1. Building Your Automation Center of Excellence Part 2: First Steps in Building Scalable RPA Infrastructure
- 2. Today’s Presenters Richard Schoen Director of Document Management HelpSystems Pat Cameron Director of Automation Technology HelpSystems
- 3. Today’s Agenda Building an automation CoE foundation Strategies for integration Software robot and workflow templates Best practices
- 4. Building Your Automation Center of Excellence Measure ROI Training & NOC Enabling Best Practices & Templates Core Team User Permissions & Auditing MEASURE & PROMOTE EMPOWER TEAMS PROCESS EXCELLENCE INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE SYSTEMS HA/DR Capacity Functional Teams Steering Committee Case Studies Prioritization & Approach Tools Evangelists
- 5. Building Your Automation Center of Excellence Measure ROI Training & NOC Enabling Best Practices & Templates Core Team User Permissions & Auditing MEASURE & PROMOTE EMPOWER TEAMS PROCESS EXCELLENCE INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE SYSTEMS HA/DR Capacity Functional Teams Steering Committee Case Studies Prioritization & Approach Tools Evangelists
- 6. Building a Foundation Automation is a project Automation is not optional Enable best practices Move beyond RPA
- 7. Automation Strategies AS IS OPTIMIZED FOR AUTOMATION REWORKED PROCESS Process MethodofAutomation INTERACTIVE INTERACTIVE &BACKEND BACKEND Proof of Concept Automation for individual productivity High frequency, multi person automation High volume, mission critical
- 8. Automation Candidates Filters Value of Filter Weighting Description 9 3 1 0 Time savings high medium low Nominal Criticality 24/7 critical for business operation business hours, important to operation multiple people time saving one person time saving 10 overall criticality of process to the busienss - individual time saving to scaling element necessary for revenue growth Error high medium low Nominial 7 impact of error on the business Frequency 10000 1000 to 10000 100 to 1000 < 100 8 number of instances per month Effort to automate high medium low Nominial 6 Urgency need immediately 5 Lifetime of automation permanent 6+ months temporary needed for migration effort one-time use 4
- 9. Where do users spend the most time doing manual work? Running daily tasks and jobs manually Transferring and processing files Interacting with web sites Entering data in multiple applications Generating reports and spreadsheets Extracting or importing Excel data Copying, pasting and reformatting Moving data between different formats Processing incoming email messages Web site, network and server monitoring Managing document workflows
- 10. Funnel Requests to Central Location Start talking to users in all departments Designate a contact person or project manager Filter all requests through that person Only do 1-2 processes to start Look for impactful processes to Automate Evaluate the process steps Talk about ROI - time and money savings Gather a list of requirements Remember this is a project like any other
- 11. Best Practices—Tasks and Workflows
- 12. Will there be user interface automation? Attended, partially attended or background Windows interactive application Web sites or applications Java applications Terminal applications Telnet, 5250, 3270, SSH SAP UI Citrix/RDP Every app interaction must be tested
- 13. Is there any background or unattended automation? Batch jobs or scheduled jobs FTP File transfers Network file transfer Inbound email box monitoring Reading and processing database records Reformatting Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, etc SharePoint documents or data Process and importing or exporting of data
- 14. Setting Expectations What percent of process can be truly automated? Some processes cannot be fully automated Will process be fully or partially attended Is process background or unattended Can business logic be systemized Can decision making be automated Break project in to phases
- 15. Automation Won’t Make a Bad Business Process Better Look at existing manual process Aim to eliminate Excel macros Discuss inefficiencies in current process Look for opportunity to re-engineer Don’t just perpetuate the old.
- 16. Automation Processes Will be Ever-Evolving New ERP New Interface/techniques discovered I.T. has embraced a process for enhancement What does that mean for the RPA process ? Processes should be evaluated regularly Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually Make sure to do it Make sure to build a focused team
- 17. Automate Strategic Services—Automation Audit People and Processes Automation Audit For Automate customers or those interested in leveraging automation Business focus (Six Sigma) Identify and prioritize automation candidates, maximize FTE efficiency You receive an assessment report, completed C&E, and documentation of existing and recommended workflows Infrastructure and Best Practice Automation Audit For existing Automate customers interested in optimizing infrastructure Infrastructure focus Ensure enterprise readiness, improve performance and scalability You receive an assessment report, recommendations, and samples
- 18. Center of Excellence Guide The Business Leader’s Handbook for Building an Automation Center of Excellence www.helpsystems.com/resources/guides/business-leaders- guide-automation-center-of-excellence
- 19. Thank You for Joining Us Contact Information Web www.helpsystems.com Email info@helpsystems.com Phone U.S. 800.328.1000 Outside U.S. +44 (0) 870.120.3148
Editor's Notes
- As mentioned I am Richard Schoen, Director of Document Management Technologies at HelpSystems. I am part of the technical solutions group at HelpSystems bringing topics like this to our customers and prospective customers. I have over 29 years of background with IBMi, Windows and Linux platform software development, system integration, managing and delivering forms and documents and helping customers automate key business processes. My co-host is Pat Cameron who is our director of automation technology. Pat why don’t you say hello and tell us a little bit about your role here at HelpSystems.
- Pat Your robotic process automation (RPA implementation is only as good as its technological foundation. Making the right choices about systems and infrastructure will set the stage for rapid growth and prevent issues down the road. To enable a successful implementation, you must allocate certain technical resources, tools, and processes. Now that you have your team put together, trained and ready to go, let’s take a look at some of the technical details required for a successful CoE. Today we’ll discuss some strategies and tactics that some of our successful customers have used, as well as how to structure your RPA environment for success.
- Pat As we discussed in our last session, most companies have islands of automation. Individuals using these tools to make their jobs easier. The first step is to get your arms around where automation is happening and where it is not and make a plan to bring it all together as a project. It’s important to make automation a project and make someone accountable for it for it to be successful and on-going. People- starting at the bottom. Core team has 3 elements: Business Analysts, developers, operations. BA’s document the process as it is from the user and impact of the automation Developers then code the automation in the most efficient fashion possible Operations is involved for testing the automation pre-production and monitoring production to ensure that all is well. Today we’ll concentrate on the right side of this chart…next slide
- On the systems side, starting on the bottom right is the infrastructure. It’s critical that you expand your infrastructure to support your team as they grow with the right environments and functionality. For instance as automation becomes more critical to the business you need the right DR plan and audit capabilities. Today we’ll spend some time discussing examples of templates and best practices in general. It’s important that each company develop their own best practices to make sure that you can re-use your automation. This includes things like making sure you are documenting what your code is doing, and breaking your processes apart into re-usable portions. Training is also a critical piece of your COE infrastructure. We often talk to customers who purchase automate to solve their immediate problem, but don’t realize many of the other capabilities the product has. Don’t see how it can solve other problems that the business areas may be having with manual tasks. Training gives you the knowledge to get more use out of the application and also give you a quicker return on your investment. You also need to make sure that you are enabling you team to work on other projects as well as take vacations and this means getting your NOC able to keep operations going as well as giving other stake-holders visibility with reporting and dashboards. Finally, it’s always good practice to measure your ROI so that you can substantiate your ongoing funding. This is use case by use case but also overall.
- Pat A C of E looks at automation as a project. The project needs an overall plan as wel as sub-project plans as we’ll see as we get into the details. The C of E core team is accountable for prioritizing, planning, and monitoring automation projects throughout the company. It provides the big picture – where are we successful and why – where have we failed and why. Automation is never ending. There’s always more to do and the team needs to be able to prioritize automation projects so that you will receive a quick and long lasting return on your investment in automation. Automation is not optional. Your competitors are automating. You need to automate. Automation will save you time and will save you money.
- We feel it is very important to help our customer take the best approach to automation for each of your business processes. Look at this along two axis - the process approach and the method of automation. 3 buckets There are may use cases where we suggest As is automation. Taking a traditional RPA / front of glass approach POCs, automation for an individual or small team May be the only option because there is no API or web service available for a particular application Based on the demand of business there are times where we suggest an optimized automation – Leveraging easy to use backend integrations, direct database access or API’s in combination with front interactivity. In the last bucket, it is important to not automate bad processes. When appropriate, we help them rework core processes and then choose the best automation method.
- Pat How to prioritize automation projects. This is an example of some of the criteria used to prioritize each request. You’ll need a method for this madness. The filters we look at are: Time savings Criticality to business Improve/eliminate errors Frequency of the task How much effort to automate – pick some low hanging fruit as well as some longer projects that may have more impact Frequency – what do you spend 30” per day doing? Daily, weekly, monthly? Urgency – is something broken. Is staff moving on to another position? Lifetime of automation – temporary, one time use. Permanent. (spoke with a customer last week who only needed the automation task twice a year – but it was reading 15,000 documents into a database.
- Richard There are many different types of automation tasks that can be accomplished with Automate. Run scheduled daily tasks - that run executables and other application programs that need to be scheduled and coordinated. Interact with web sites and windows applications – In many cases we work with business departments who are trying to automate users daily work such as entering data into multiple applications or copying and pasting data between applications and excel. Generate reports – Often times users are logging into applications and running or generating their own reports via application system menus because their software lacks the ability to schedule automations to run reports and other processes. Extract or import data to excel – Often users receive Excel or CSV files or need to generate files for sending to vendors and customers. Using the AutoMate capabilities to read and write these files and import or export data is a huge time saver. Read and write to databases – When data needs to be quickly extracted from a database or inserted/updated into a database the database actions can be very important. Process incoming email messages – Often customers receive emails that might contain information or attachments to be processed. Accounts payable is a good example of receiving and processing file attachments. Where are users spending lots of time? – As you start looking within your own businesses you will start to discover automation opportunities where you can save your end users and IT departments lots of time.
- Richard Start talking to users in all departments Designate a contact person or project manager Filter all requests through that person Only do 1-2 processes to start Look for impactful processes to Automate Evaluate the process steps Talk about ROI - time and money savings Many manual steps Manual or dual data entry Remember this is a business process project like any other
- Richard Re-usable ‘bots – variables, parameters Multiple robots Re-usable workflows – error recovery,
- Richard Normally before a center of excellence team is created there are a few use-cases defined for automation that are tested and vetted for appropriate business value and return. Then once value is proven the team building process can continue. Someone from the IT or business team may be drafted to be that initial automation process leader. This is normally someone with some analytical skills, people skills, macro building or light scripting or programming skills Here’s an example of what one of our customers did. They took an interesting approach to building out their initial RPA team. They hired their first process automation team member who had a background and good experience as a call center manager. He had a great requirements gathering background, was a great people person and took amazing notes for documentation purposes. His technical skills were not that great yet, but he had technical aptitude and a desire to learn. We paired him with a mentor from our services team to build out his teams initial processes based on their requirements while he is getting trained and up to speed on building RPA processes. Your initial RPA Center of Excellence team may contain only one or two people to start with while your company is working towards a few initial automation process successes. An ideal small initial team in my opinion would consist of someone with business skills and someone with the technical skillset to build initial automation workflows. The team can grow from there. Once initial success is achieved your initial RPA team members can start reaching out to the various departments to ask what sorts of work the users are doing regularly for 30 minutes or more each day where automation might help. The customer I was just talking about has also instituted an initial review process with the IT team so they can determine if there are any minor IT changes that could be done to benefit the automation processes during initial rollout to make things smoother. In many cases by utilizing web services and database calls and existing applications in a process, the need for implementing user interface automation can be reduced or eliminated by using direct system integration points to make RPA processes much more flexible and resilient.
- Richard Normally before a center of excellence team is created there are a few use-cases defined for automation that are tested and vetted for appropriate business value and return. Then once value is proven the team building process can continue. Someone from the IT or business team may be drafted to be that initial automation process leader. This is normally someone with some analytical skills, people skills, macro building or light scripting or programming skills Here’s an example of what one of our customers did. They took an interesting approach to building out their initial RPA team. They hired their first process automation team member who had a background and good experience as a call center manager. He had a great requirements gathering background, was a great people person and took amazing notes for documentation purposes. His technical skills were not that great yet, but he had technical aptitude and a desire to learn. We paired him with a mentor from our services team to build out his teams initial processes based on their requirements while he is getting trained and up to speed on building RPA processes. Your initial RPA Center of Excellence team may contain only one or two people to start with while your company is working towards a few initial automation process successes. An ideal small initial team in my opinion would consist of someone with business skills and someone with the technical skillset to build initial automation workflows. The team can grow from there. Once initial success is achieved your initial RPA team members can start reaching out to the various departments to ask what sorts of work the users are doing regularly for 30 minutes or more each day where automation might help. The customer I was just talking about has also instituted an initial review process with the IT team so they can determine if there are any minor IT changes that could be done to benefit the automation processes during initial rollout to make things smoother. In many cases by utilizing web services and database calls and existing applications in a process, the need for implementing user interface automation can be reduced or eliminated by using direct system integration points to make RPA processes much more flexible and resilient.
- Phases – 30% first phase, additional savings. Depending on hours consumed 10-30 savings can be a lot of time.
- Look at existing manual process Aim to eliminate Excel macros that support manual effort and still require copy/paste of data Talk about inefficiencies in current process Look for opportunity to re-engineer process steps during RPA definition. Don’t just perpetuate the old.
- Review this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/robotic-process-automation-bots-coming-steve-apsee/?trackingId=3jrdTN3Oh7B0VQaxiGzK7Q%3D%3D Normally before a center of excellence team is created there are a few use-cases defined for automation that are tested and vetted for appropriate business value and return. Then once value is proven the team building process can continue. Someone from the IT or business team may be drafted to be that initial automation process leader. This is normally someone with some analytical skills, people skills, macro building or light scripting or programming skills Here’s an example of what one of our customers did. They took an interesting approach to building out their initial RPA team. They hired their first process automation team member who had a background and good experience as a call center manager. He had a great requirements gathering background, was a great people person and took amazing notes for documentation purposes. His technical skills were not that great yet, but he had technical aptitude and a desire to learn. We paired him with a mentor from our services team to build out his teams initial processes based on their requirements while he is getting trained and up to speed on building RPA processes. Your initial RPA Center of Excellence team may contain only one or two people to start with while your company is working towards a few initial automation process successes. An ideal small initial team in my opinion would consist of someone with business skills and someone with the technical skillset to build initial automation workflows. The team can grow from there. Once initial success is achieved your initial RPA team members can start reaching out to the various departments to ask what sorts of work the users are doing regularly for 30 minutes or more each day where automation might help. The customer I was just talking about has also instituted an initial review process with the IT team so they can determine if there are any minor IT changes that could be done to benefit the automation processes during initial rollout to make things smoother. In many cases by utilizing web services and database calls and existing applications in a process, the need for implementing user interface automation can be reduced or eliminated by using direct system integration points to make RPA processes much more flexible and resilient.
- Pat We offer services to help you get started with your automation projects or review your existing ones. People and Process – new customers – focus on finding and prioritizing automation opportunities Infrastructure and best Practices – existing customer – optimize their infrastructure. Recommendations for improving performance and scalability.
- www.helpsystems.com/cta/robotic-process-automation-guide www.helpsystems.com/rpa www.helpsystems.com/resources/guides/business-leaders-guide-automation-center-of-excellence We also have a couple sample tasks that you can download to help you get started quickly with Automation.