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We all have heard about the brighter side of how skilled professionals in RPA use this technology to help organizations achieve better operational efficiency, provide 100% ROI in less than 6-9 months, improve employee morale and also assist in scaling up business operations in a short span of time. All these facts are true; however, it does not mean that RPA projects are perfect and without any challenges. So, in this article on RPA Challenges, let’s discuss the different challenges faced by RPA projects.
The following points will be covered in this article:
- Shortage of skilled resources
- Challenge in automating end to end use cases
- Lack of required support from Business
- Lack of proper team structure
- Vaguely defined Business continuity plans
- Culture shock
- Incorrectly identified use-cases for automation
- Not following best practices
- Not enough support from the RPA platform vendor
- Post-Implementation Adoption
RPA Challenges
RPA ChallengesShortage of Skilled resources
We all agree that RPA is booming with the increase in the requirements of today’s market, but, however, there is a shortage of skilled resources in the RPA market. Procuring resources while starting a new project and backfilling a key resource in case of attrition poses a great threat to the success of any project. Also, RPA professionals with extensive experience expect lucrative packages which might not be financially viable for some of the companies.
Unable to automate end to end use cases
In some of the processes, not all the steps can be automated directly by using rule-based RPA tools. Instead, it would require integration with Machine learning algorithms, and OCR engines. However, these additional technology components will cost extra money and skill-set which might not produce the expected results to the business leaders.
Lack of required support from Business
For an RPA project to be successful, it is important that the business use cases are provided with the necessary workflow diagrams, possible workarounds for potential failure scenarios, business rules for different kinds of data to be processed by the Bot and technical exceptions faced by the operations team during manual processing.
If the business is not really inclined to provide the required support, RPA projects will thus face challenges in getting a comprehensive Process Design Document created, during the user acceptance tests. These tests require businesses to provide critical feedback regarding the Bot execution.
Lack of proper team structure
Dedicated teams with clearly defined roles for each and every individual to ensure the hand-offs happen on time with the expected standards. Lack of adequate knowledge about the processes to be followed and sharing of resources between multiple projects poses a risk in achieving the set milestones for RPA projects.
Vaguely defined business continuity plans
The expectation about RPA projects is set in such a way that once the Bots are deployed in production, there should be minimal to no maintenance required to ensure smooth delivery. However, the reality is that it does require maintenance in terms of identification of new unhandled scenarios during Bot execution, issues faced in production environments, defining Bot execution schedules based on requirements from multiple business units operating from different time zones, and mitigation plans during major failures.
Culture shock
Typically organizations implement any new process/technology either using ‘Top-Down approach’ or ‘Bottom-Up Approach’. In a top-down approach, senior leadership identifies that RPA has to be implemented across the organization. However, without the lack of awareness about the impact of new technology, RPA automation will create a negative impression among the employees as it might spark fear of losing jobs and unclear responsibilities after automated Bots are deployed.
Incorrectly identified Use cases for automation
Identification of use cases that can provide a good ROI is critical to get the business’s buy-in, as it would be enough budget allocation for the next set of processes to be automated. Incorrectly identified use cases will only produce a low ROI, and would not improve the process efficiency as expected by the business or even the metrics proposed to the Business. The complexity of processes identified for automation plays an important in producing the expected ROI.
Not following best practices
If the team does not follow the best practices, it would be hard to debug the code, difficult for other team members to understand and re-use the flow. In case of transitions, the time taken for the new members would be longer than expected. When there is a need to upgrade the solution, it will be a daunting task to decode the logic.
Not enough support from the RPA platform vendor
In almost all the RPA projects, we will come across situations where there would not be a straightforward solution. In this case, if the team members are unable to automate a particular step, it is important to ensure there is enough support from the RPA platform vendor as they have the expertise in using the tool features and would also have seen the implementation of these features in multiple ways by different customers. More can be learned from this RPA Certification Program.
Post-Implementation Adoption
Businesses often take all the measures required before the adoption of RPA. However, they fail to take care of the pushbacks, which might come after the automation is deployed into the production.
So, we can conclude by saying that, knowledge of the challenges faced by different projects provides a checklist for being prepared to not fall into one of the categories mentioned above. It also helps in creating a knowledge pool of possible resolutions for each challenge identified, different approaches of solving them and how to improvise on each solution once they are implemented.
So, guys, with this we come to an end of this article on RPA Challenges. The challenges discussed in this article will help you, avoid them in the future when you work on RPA Projects. Now that you have understood the RPA Projects, check out theRPA Developer Course &Automation Anywhere Certification course by Edureka, a trusted online learning company with a network of more than 250,000 satisfied learners spread across the globe. Both, these certifications will help you get an in-depth knowledge of UiPath and Automation Anywhere respectively.
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