What is RPA? A revolution in business process automation

6. Project governance is paramount

Another problem that pops up in RPA is the failure to plan for certain roadblocks, Srivastava says. An employee at a Genpact client changed the company’s password policy, but no one programmed the bots to adjust, resulting in lost data. CIOs must constantly check for chokepoints where their RPA solution can bog down, or, at least, install a monitoring and alert system to watch for hiccups impacting performance. “You can’t just set them free and let them run around,” Srivastava says. “You need command and control.”

7. Control maintains compliance

There are lot of governance challenges related to instantiating a single bot, let alone thousands. One Deloitte client spent several meetings trying to determine whether its bot was male or female, a valid gender question, but one that must take into account human resources, ethics, and other areas of compliance for the business.

8. Build an RPA center of excellence

The most successful RPA implementations include a center of excellence staffed by people responsible for making efficiency programs a success within the organization. Not every enterprise, however, has the budget for this. The RPA center of excellence develops business cases, calculating potential cost optimization and ROI, and measures progress against those goals.