While we’re evangelical about the benefits RPA can bring, we’d be the first to counsel that it takes careful planning and an informed approach if you want to drive maximum value out of the technology.
So we say bravo to Forbes’ Naveen Joshi, for his excellent and well balanced article Leverage RPA, But Plan For Its Inherent Risks, Too! (June 2019).
Joshi expands on five common sense tips to help minimize the risks:
- Make informed decisions
- Hire experienced professionals
- Train staff
- Monitor automated processes
- Ensure data security
Tip #1 is something we say again and again. Choosing the right processes for RPA is crucial. Repetitive, rule-based and consistent are three watchwords. You’re looking for tasks with low exception rates, needing little or no judgement. As Joshi says, “processes that fail to meet [these] criteria… won’t offer enough value to be worth the investment.”
How can you be sure you’re making good decisions? That takes us neatly into tips #2 and #3 – you need expert support and you need to get your team skilled up. We can help you do both those things. Experts and specialists are your friends when it comes to delivering RPA benefit precisely and quickly, and at Lanshore we are all of those things.
Tip #4 is not just about controlling processes and spotting anomalies or breakdowns. It’s also about giving business leaders the big picture of how RPA is delivering for the organization. Analytics insights from RPA help you improve iteratively as well as confirming that you’re achieving the business case.
And as for tip #5, security is key, of course, in context of our era’s new wave of sophisticated cybercrime. We’re not into scaremongering, but as for any technology platform or tool, there are new security measures to lock down to make sure that bot access to data is managed as carefully as human access to data.
If you’ve got RPA risks on your mind, talk to a Lanshore consultant to understand how you could mitigate them and go forward confidently to reap the benefits.
Read the full article at forbes.com