- Now that you have a good grasp of RPA as a technology
and the benefits it affords, we can introduce
some RPA implementation concepts starting
at the process level, after that we'll move on to some
of the enterprise level concepts.
Both are equally important.
Identifying good candidates for automation
is one of the first steps in your journey
and frankly one of the most important.
In my experience once you look at the organization
through an RPA lens you'll find an abundance
of potential opportunity which
is exciting but also daunting.
At this stage of your journey, you need a framework
to measure how good a particular process is for automation
and how much impact the automation might have
on the business, take note of what I just said.
Just because a process may be a spectacular candidate
for automation doesn't necessarily mean that
it's worth automating.
Given the lessons you've learned in this course
it now becomes your responsibility
to rank candidate processes with this in mind.
So what makes for a good candidate process?
I like to imagine sliders to visualize the degree
to which certain factors contribute to process candidacy.
Far right means you have a good process.
Far left not so much.
Let's take the nature of work for example,
a process where employees follow a strict set of rules
is more automatable than one that has decisions
open to employee discretion and judgment.
As I mentioned before RPA is great for automating
the routine and rule based where you have
employees doing swivel chair integration
to execute those rules.
On the other hand where decisions have to be made
in the approval of a loan or the treatment
of a particular exception to a rule for instance
you'll still need people to perform these tasks.
Now one quick aside, from my experience teams often
feel that the work that they do is special
and too complicated to modeled
or boiled down to simple rules.
While the work they do may be important
my experience suggests that once a task
is atomized into its smallest constituent parts
you'll find that much of the work in an organization
can be classified as highly rule based
and therefore highly automatable.
The next slider is inputs and outputs involved in a process.
Processes that use structured standardized inputs
are better candidates than processes
that use unstructured inputs.
Structured inputs are things like formatted spreadsheets
databases, JSON files, CSV files, XML
and other electronic feeds.
Because of their digital and structured nature
they're a better fit for RPA than unstructured formats
like scanned documents, faxes, handwritten forms or emails.
In terms of integration options consider user interface
as the lightest form of integration if you will
and APIs as the deepest.
Processes in which people navigate
and control applications to perform
a task are the sweet spot for RPA.
Which simply emulates the set of activities.
RPA can work with APIs but it's less common,
API integration is often a bit more complex
than working directly with the user interface
but it largely depends on the application.
We often say if you have an API, use it.
There may be no need to copy its functionality using RPA.
Although that decision should be made
in a case by case basis.
As a site note, the fact that RPA uses the interface
is a big deal, it means the underlying applications
can be maintained and preserved.
Effectively, you're not messing with enterprise systems
this should be a huge selling point to your IT team.
Lastly, the type of data in a process should be considered
RPA works best with text and numbers since it can
guarantee accuracy when programmed correctly.
Image interpretation is possible in rare cases
but it's usually not an ideal use case.
You might encounter images when a process
calls for signature verification for instance.
Or the interpretation of a scanned PDF.
RPA is not the tool you'd use here, instead you'd supplement
the solution with some form
of cognitive image recognition capability.
These factors determine how well suited
a process is for RPA, and you'll want the sliders
to become second nature as you scan your organization.
For that reason we've made the sliders available to you
in the exercise files, but you're not done yet!
Next you'll wanna think about the aspects
of the process that influence the degree
to which a project might deliver benefits.