| | JULY 202019CIOReviewFor most businesses that operate a legacy environment, the ability to adapt, change, react, evolve and develop is a herculean effortfrom other integrated capabilities across a value stream make it very advantageous for any continuous improvement effort. Versus, manually traversing multiple data sources and stitching this data seamlessly across a value stream to determine where your opportunities are. The other advantage of bots is the adaptability and flexibility as the ever-changing business needs change. For most businesses that operate a legacy environment, the ability to adapt, change, react, evolve and develop is a herculean effort. And what do businesses do to compensate for this challenge? They use people to fill the gap between what legacy systems can't do and to produce the outputs of processes. Using this combination of legacy technology and people bloats your value streams. So, by using bots to replace capacity that otherwise humans would be used makes the process cleaner and less complicated, therefore, optimizing business and process performance. Now that we understand how RPA can be used to automate manual and repetitive processes, let me provide you with a few suggestions to avoid falling into the trap of sub-optimizing your RPA efforts. First, always start at the top of the house by identifying your strategic business objectives (SBOs). Second, identify the critical business process value streams that are connected to these SBOs. These first few steps will pave the way for carving out your initial RPA opportunity space. Then, after you identify your RPA deployment space, target the sub-processes that drive a majority of your value stream performance. Now that your opportunity space is defined, look to create handshakes between multiple process technology capabilities (i.e. AI, RPA, WfM) across these targeted value streams (Figure 3). This will put you in a position to establish a working relationship between technological capabilities. This will also maximizethe ever-allusive ROI for your organization's technological assets. Lastly, and most important, deploy RPA with good business process management. Good business process management entails implementing, monitoring and keeping bots busy. And keeping bots busy is important because bots are good employees. Deploying good BPM practices will put your organization on the path to bringing together business, processes, and technological capabilities as an integrated solution, versus randomly deploying technological capabilities and potentially making your business and processes more inefficient and ineffective.
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