Robotic Process Automation Efforts Suffer From Poor Planning: Study
Software bots promise greater efficiency, but first companies need to optimize processes
Sara Castellanos and Steven Norton
Software robots don’t need to take breaks, they don’t make mistakes, and they can do the boring work for human employees. But there are growing pains associated with deploying robotic process automation, analysts say.
Finding the right opportunities to automate, defining the right level of automation for a set of tasks and finding the right talent to design and develop robots are among those challenges, according to a recent study by The Hackett Group Inc.
“Despite its relative ease of implementation compared to many enterprise technology solutions, RPA has come with a greater-than-expected learning curve,” wrote Erik Dorr, Vin Kumar and Paul Morrison, authors of the report.
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Companies are also failing to optimize processes or address data quality issues before introducing RPA to the workforce, and they’re underestimating the amount of time and resources required to deploy the robots, according to the study, released this month.
Software robots are part of an industry called robotic process automation, which is evolving to include advanced software bots built with machine learning algorithms in order to perform tasks such as object recognition. Other software bots, though, don’t require artificial intelligence because they are designed to complete rules-based tasks.
They perform a wide variety of tasks ranging from extracting and entering data and processing and updating form to formatting and downloading, updating and uploading files.
Analysts have been tracking robotic process automation for nearly five years. The Hackett Group found that companies that have successfully deployed RPA are disciplined and methodical about identifying the right opportunities for software robots. They’re also good at planning and organizing their RPA programs.