Reasons for failures in RPA projects

RPA becomes the key element of digital business transformation. After Covid 19, according to latest Gartner study 24% of CFOs will invest more into RPA than before.
Seems like RPA may become the main remedy for finance transformation problems in response to post Covid 19 world. However at the same time one of EY reports indicates that as many as 30-50% of RPA projects fail due to common mistakes. We don't see as many failures at SNTE as EY indicates, but we do recognize frequent issues in delivery of RPA projects.

Based on our experience the main following issues come up as main reasons for failures.

1. Lack of proper selection of processes and task for automation
Before implementation of any RPA solution a throughout review of processes should be carried out to make sure which tasks and why those tasks are selected to be optimised by RPA.
We often found that sometimes it may be easier to update or slightly change a process to achieve similar result as if RPA had been implemented.
Company needs to have a long term vision how RPA will fit in its structure and processes to maximize the advantages of it.

2. Lack of involvement of IT
IT and business need to be both involved and understand how RPA will benefit the company as a whole.
Business needs the support from IT to make sure that relevant accesses or other IT assets are made available on time and how RPA fits in overall IT strategy, including security issues.
IT technical expertise and data security competence in particular, knowledge of the current IT infrastructure, or the testing or maintenance capabilities, are just some of the reasons why IT needs to be involved from the start.

3. Forgetting about involvement of people
Bots are a tool to help people work better, faster, more accurately etc.
Sometimes it may seem that bots are able to replace people and we tend to forget that people are the key element of the whole process.
If employees are afraid that bots would take their jobs they may hinder the change make the whole process much more difficult.
It is important that people understand that teaming up with bots will accellerate their jobs, help them work more accurately and let them focus on value added tasks that needs decission making rather than processing of things.

Please contact us when you want to fit your people and organization with intelligent tools to gain advantage