RPA Process Analysis Workshop

We have done a few Process Analysis for RPA in our time, let us guide you through the process of doing an RPA Process Workshop on your own.

RPA Process Analysis workshop is the activity which an organization should perform as the first step when they are looking to bring in automation to their processes. This activity will assist stakeholders in understanding and evaluating the impact that the automation can bring into their business and the ROI. Apart from knowledge and evaluation, this exercise will also help the stakeholders to identify and optimize any inefficient parts of the process.

Understanding the existing process

The first and foremost step in the workshop is to connect with all the stakeholders and the domain experts involved in the current process to understand the existing workflow, which is most commonly manual.

All the minute parts of the process will be captured and recorded. This is important so that we don’t miss out anything when we migrate it to a Robotic process.

Breaking down to atomic process

Once the process is captured clearly, the next step is to break it down into smaller pieces, independent of its own. These pieces are then arranged either sequentially or parallelly based on their dependencies and functionalities.

These pieces form the building blocks for the final output and enable us to find all the inefficiencies.

Identifying the actors and external systems

As a next step, we need to map all possible sub-processes to the actors who handle it and also with the external systems these processes are dependent on.

For instance, if there is a subprocess of filling an employee form for the onboarding process and the certificates are fetched from external storage using a web service. The actor is the one who enters the information, and the external services are the web service call we make.

Identifying this will help us with mapping the actors and the services in the future steps.

Identifying the challenges and ability of RPA tools

The sub-processes are mapped with the ability of the chosen RPA tool. Here there might be some processes that could not easily fit in the scope of the RPA tool, and we need to identify them and do a risk assessment.

The RPA engineer will look into those roadblocks and comes up with an alternative way to handle them by building a middleware which stays between the task and the RPA process.

This step is crucial that the engineer should solve the roadblock without compromising on any of the compliances or business rules. Thus any of the tools or middleware that doesn’t obey the business rules and values shouldn’t be brought in.

Drafting a workflow document

Having collected all the information from the previous stages of the workshop, the RPA engineering team will be curating a workflow document of the process in the angle of RPA bots. The stakeholders now have a clear picture of how the processes get migrated from manual ways to an automated way.

This step outputs a flow chart comprising information about the systems involved in the process and their functionalities at the atomic level.

Cost and time evaluation of RPA process

On freezing the workflow, the cost and time of implementing the RPA bot for the corresponding process are evaluated. This assists the stakeholders to understand the difference it can bring to their organization and whether to adopt RPA for the selected process.

Apart from cost and time, other aspects including a reduction in human error, additional exception handling, scalability are also considered here.