RPA Test Questions

What are the factors to take into account when investing in RPA?

Saves time, cost & labor Increased efficiency and capacity decreased variation and reduced errors adaptable to change

Target revenue-generation while reaching for cost-savings

• Formalize an enterprise automation roadmap and make the business case for RPA realistic and accessible • Communicate with the rest of your organization about RPA plans • Avoid focusing on RPA as simply a way to reduce labor costs • If employees are moved to other tasks, then cost reduction will not be achieved • Instead, think about ways in which RPA can be used to generate revenue and improve quality • Still target some quick wins to demonstrate potential

How can we ensure that the bot delivers over time?

• Have personnel dedicated to managing bots • Those can easily be located abroad, working on a control room • Have software and analytics to understand bot performance • You also need to understand your automation targets • Have contingency plans for bots who stop working ("get sick or go on vacation") • Quickly audit what is wrong and fix the problem to have the bot back in action

How do we make a bot operational?

• Redesign processes to support the bot and the human work • For example, dealing with exceptions • Understand the security implications • Bots need credentials too and even background cheks at times • Understanding governance as it applies to the bot and its actions • Who makes decisions about the bot? What is the "chain of command"? • Have a deployment roadmap • How will you take the bot from design to production?

What are some trends in the RPA industry?

• Renting RPA or on-demand SaaS • An expanding set of RPA vendors • Transition services will grow to help users switch from one RPA tool to another • More specialist automation service companies • Preconfigured scripts of business-process "best/better practices" • Process mining, process discovery and business analysis tools • "AI" functionality is being incorporated

How can we ensure that creating the bot script delivers good results?

• Train people so that they can use the tool properly • Ideally, the scripts would be created by business people, not IT professionals • Have documented processes that can be translated into scripts • If the process is well understood and documented, then it is simply a matter of translating the process into the RPA software • Understand the interfaces between applications • How to transfer data from one application to another application • Test, test again, and test even more

Automation should be a business initiative supported by IT

• Ultimately, business users should be responsible for creating the bots • However, IT still retains a fundamental role • Policies ( e.g., security, access, auditing, "coding") need to be created, promoted • Systems might be changed, new forms and interfaces created, operational loading managed, etc. • Remember: only the business side can realize the benefits from a technology solution • RPA should not be seen as an IT initiative and the role of the IT team should be formalized early

What are the differences between RPA tools

• Unattended deployment versus attended deployment • Crafting "instructions" for the bot to run • Generic RPA tools or process-specific automation tools • Some limited or no artificial intelligence (AI) or machine-learning capabilities • Price point and licensing agreements

Selecting a good process candidate

• Understanding and documenting processes becomes fundamental • Not having standardized, repetitive tasks decreases the success of an RPA implementation • Focus on "swivel chair integration" dealing with structured data • That is, a "paper pushing" situation • Verify if COTS options are not available

Why does RPA have the ability to scale quickly?

• When RPA works, companies quickly go from a couple of bots to dozens of bots in little time • Preparation for scaling should come very early, including personnel to monitor bots

What is RPA?

"Robotic process automation (RPA) tools perform 'if, then, else' statements on structured data, typically using a combination of user interface (UI) interactions, or by connecting to APIs to drive client servers, mainframes or HTML code. An RPA tool operates by mapping a process in the RPA tool language for the software "robot" to follow, with runtime allocated to execute the script by a control dashboard"

What are the steps to implement RPA?

1. A process (or a set of processes) is deemed to be a good candidate for RPA 2. A "process developer" creates the detailed set of steps for the automation bot 3. The bot becomes operational and uses software licenses to perform the steps 4. The bot is centrally monitored for performance 5. Performance improves and everybody is happy

What causes RPA efforts to fail?

1. Not considering RPA as business-led, as opposed to IT led 2. Not having an RPA business case and postponing planning until after proof-of-concepts (POCs) or pilots 3. Underestimating what happens after processes have been automated 4. Treating Robotics as a series of automations vs. an end-to-end change program 5. Targeting RPA at the wrong processes 6. Applying traditional delivery methodologies 7. Automating too much of a process or not optimizing for RPA 8. Forgetting about IT infrastructure 9. Assuming RPA is all that's needed to achieve a great ROI 10. Assuming skills needed to create a PoC are good enough for production automation

Who are the market leaders for RPA?

Automation Anyware Blue Prism UiPath