Digital transformation is not static, and neither are the objectives of organizations. For leaders embarking on the automation journey, it’s crucial to look beyond short-term objectives and plan for the future. RPA solutions offered by UiPath have captured the attention of many enterprise leaders, helping them compete effectively. At the same time, many leaders have achieved only a fraction of their automation success despite leveraging UiPath RPA functionalities. Thus, the key to UiPath automation success lies in scaling up automation initiatives.
However, the road to scaling up UiPath automation initiatives is not without complications. That’s why working with dedicated UiPath consultants is essential for leaders to drive automation success. By leveraging the right implementation levers and change management practices, consultants support the organizational shift and enrich the experiences of both employees and end-users.
Barriers to Scaling Up UiPath Automation Initiatives
Before diving into the importance of working with UiPath consultants, let’s look at some of the key challenges/factors that inhibit leaders from scaling UiPath robotic process automation programs.
- Data Protection Concerns – End-to-end process automation requires leaders to share access to customer and business data. Engaging in-house IT teams to assess the scope and test UiPath automation solutions does not ensure proper data governance and controls. Consecutively, organizations might face unintended data protection and compliance consequences.
- Accessing Skilled Resources – UiPath RPA’s potential can be realized only when companies acquire or build an internal team of experienced, talented resources. Organizations need professionals with in-depth knowledge of the UiPath RPA ecosystem, capabilities, and skills such as programming knowledge, data transformation, and configuration – to implement them successfully. The scarcity of practical knowledge and skills to build, organize, and implement UiPath automation solutions obstructs the progress.
- Employing Change Management Strategy – Around 62% of tech respondents mention that automation programs often encounter resistance from several teams within an organization. Skepticism about the changes in UiPath RPA technologies could produce a negative sentiment and derail scaling initiatives. A lack of change management and governance demonstrates an organization’s inability to form an inclusive culture that encourages the workforce to adopt new technologies and modernize processes.
- Creating Firm Automation Strategy and Roadmap – The lack of a strong UiPath automation strategy is one of the key barriers to scaling up automation. Creating a UiPath automation strategy involves describing a forward-looking vision, forming a detailed technology roadmap, discovering the right use cases, and constituting the appropriate governance structure and operating model. Lack of UiPath RPA executive guidance leads to gaps in vision and siloed process automation.
- Retaining a Pipeline of Opportunities – Another major challenge that business leaders face is the inability to maintain a healthy pipeline of operations to automate when scaling up. Companies should embark on the UiPath RPA journeys by aiming at particular automation opportunities. After the initial wave of advantages, management often finds it challenging to discover additional opportunities and ways to leverage different technological solutions, preventing them from achieving positive outcomes on a scale.
To overcome these barriers, hiring dedicated UiPath consultants is the right choice. Dedicated UiPath consultants are well-acquainted with the nitty-gritties of scaling up UiPath automation initiatives, which yield strategic benefits including:
- Cost Impact – Enhanced FTE capacity, cost savings, and increased number of automated hours.
- Strategic Profits –Return on Investment (ROI), revenue growth, business continuity, greater customer satisfaction and employee experience.
- Operational Impact – Higher governance, operational efficiency, employee productivity, and shorter turnaround time.
Implementing Strategic Automation With UiPath Consultants
Transformative success with UiPath RPA comes when companies embrace strategic implementation rather than a typical tactical approach. The tactical approach is automating basic, established processes. A strategic approach looks beyond customary processes and finds ways to form a network of automated processes in a robust and consistent way.
To kickstart this level of automation journey, organizations should team up with recognized UiPath consulting partners. By using a process assessment tool, the consultants evaluate the effectiveness of the current program and discover new growth opportunities. This is done through process mining. Process mining leverages data-driven analysis software to look for potential automation opportunities. With this knowledge, consultants can create a roadmap for viable scaling and enhancement practices.
Improving Sustainability and Scalability of RPA Programs – Proven Practices followed by UiPath Consultants
- Start Creating Vision with Process Mining
UiPath Process automation initiatives led by dedicated consulting firms are highly lucrative. The consultants effectively understand existing operational demands and challenges and determine where UiPath automation will have the greatest impact. With the help of UiPath process mining tools, consultants can visualize entire processes, create a vision/roadmap, and gain a path towards automation scaling.
In short, the consultants ensure that the UiPath automation vision/roadmap is aligned with the extensive business needs. Rather than focusing on tactical, short-term savings, the consultants prioritize broader, longer-term goals.
With the process mining software, UiPath consultants use raw data and event logs to excerpt process sequences and resolve inaccuracies. The insights offer consultants an accurate overview of everything happening within end-to-end processes, which supports more strategic vision conception and decision-making. After creating a vision, a clear conveyance of the vision across the teams and stakeholders is crucial. This helps business owners visualize the end objective, what must be in place to attain it, and how to train/support internal workers on UiPath automation.
- Buy-in Key Stakeholders
Turning a UiPath automation vision or strategy into a practical use case is highly difficult, without buy-in from IT and other C-suite personnel. So, tech leaders should enable UiPath consultants to interact with key stakeholders and keep them involved from the start of the project. As the stakeholders provide support on many critical aspects, UiPath consultants can maintain bot security, compliance, as well as automation infrastructure.
UiPath consultants liaise with internal stakeholders before implementing any new initiative; thereby, reducing any operational impacts. Moreover, when multiple stakeholders realize UiPath RPA scaling as a strategic business project, they’ll sponsor and promote it, while delivering the additional financial and human resources required to make it successful.
- Set up a Governance Board
Next up, UiPath RPA consultants form a governance board that’s accountable for implementing the robust automation strategy and fulfilling enterprise objectives. Typically led by the dedicated UiPath consultant, together with IT, business, and change personnel, a governing board:
- Organizes all UiPath automation demand produced via the pipeline
- Extends the presence of UiPath digital workers across the organization to identify processes and automation opportunities, while minimizing internal fear of change
- Gauges the value UiPath automation generates and communicates this throughout the network
- Discovers opportunities to drive maximum value from scaling UiPath automation programs and generating sponsorship for these initiatives
To scale effectively with UiPath RPA, governance is essential. The governance board implementation helps leaders to drive enterprise-wide automation, track performance effectively, mitigate issues, and improve compliance. It also establishes trust in new ways of working.
- Develop Project Structure and Promote Reusability
Consultants from a recognized UiPath development services provider develop an exclusive PDD (Process Design Document) for each business by collaborating with the in-house project managers. The key purpose of creating this document is to enable process owners to make changes to UiPath automation programs without developer involvement. This document acts as the record for process owners to log modifications made in the workflows. This document maintenance enables leaders to store other workflow components, such as login credentials, file paths, URLs, and user recipients.
Creating a centralized design document also helps citizen developers and process owners reuse automation components in other parts of UiPath automation workflows. This will not only make workflow development faster, but will also make it easier to scale automation in the long term.
Closing Thoughts
Having a vision-aligned strategy and structured operating methodology is crucial to scaling automation at every stage of the UiPath automation journey. In addition, obtaining dedicated support from UiPath consulting services providers guarantees long-term efficiency and success for project managers. Organizations can also train their in-house professionals with the help of dedicated consultants and democratize automation.
