What Should the Model RPA Development and Implementation Process Look Like?

RPA is taking industries by storm.

From healthcare, finance, insurance, real estate, and logistics to national defense and smart cities, companies are looking for ways to automate data-heavy, repetitive tasks, cut costs, and increase efficiency. And with the rising costs of resources and employment, broken supply chain, and growing competitiveness, the need for process optimization is greater than ever.

Top solutions for the finance and banking industry or automation for consultancy.

RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, can fully automate complex, data-heavy, time-consuming tasks and complete them in a split second. With the 0% margin of error and being able to run 24/7, this technology can unlock your team’s productivity, letting them focus on tasks that matter.

And what can RPA take care of? Among many things, it’s perfect for data entry on a scale, document processing, account registration, eligibility checks, transferring huge amounts of information between various systems and CRMs (sometimes from the public domain), or integrating whole departments. (You can read more examples of Robotic Process Automation implementation here).

But for RPA to truly shine and bring value to your business, it must be done right. That’s why a correctly mapped process of implementation of RPA is so important.

Here is a model RPA development and implementation process in 9 steps. This is what an organization looking for an automation development partner should expect from collaboration every step of the way. 

Of course, in some cases, the process will be different: you may already have precise automation for implementation in mind, or maybe you already have some automation (or even RPA) setup in place.   

But usually, the whole journey looks like this.  

This is more of a step zero in the RPA development process, but it is important to mention. As every collaboration starts with a conversation, the RPA development process begins during the intro call between the client and the agency.

Talking to a business advisor or RPA consultant during the first call would be best. They should ask you about your company, business challenges, and processes. The goal here is to understand your needs and vision.

At this point, you will be asked if you have a specific process for automation in mind or if you are interested in implementing RPA more broadly within your company and need help selecting the right processes.

Depending on the answer, you will either be asked to participate in a process discovery workshop or analyze the process you want to automate, ensuring it is eligible for automation.

What is needed from you at this point?

A decisive person (preferably: upper management) to take part in a 30-60 min discovery call.

What is the outcome of the step?

The RPA team has collected the requirements and understands your needs.

In most cases, this will be the first step of the collaboration that adds value to the process.

Suppose you are unsure which processes in your company should be automated. In that case, RPA consultants and business process advisors will enter your organization and talk to your team to discover all the processes. The goals are to identify bottlenecks and suboptimal flows and map your actions, tools, and stakeholders.

The RPA team should also analyze all the legal implications and aspects of automation to ensure compliance with relevant juridical systems, such as HIPAA compliance for the medical billing industry in the US.

Next, the processes should be audited, and their automation potential should be analyzed based on the expected ROI and Expected Business Value.

These are just some metrics you can focus on. You can read more about the key RPA metrics and how we calculate them here.

Afterward, the technical Architect, in collaboration with the process Architect, will put together a Process Definition Document (PDD), which contains information about every process/step depth.

This step is also a great opportunity to look at your company from the outside and learn how you operate daily.

What is needed from you at this point?

Selecting a Single Person of Contact for communication.

Selecting people to participate in process discovery workshops

(usually: management, people operations, tech leads)

What is the outcome of the step?

A map of processes within your organization and automation roadmap

Based on your business needs and the estimated ROI that can be delivered from every automation, you and your RPA development partner will together select a key process that should be automated in the first place.

The model RPA development process should start with automating one, a ke