How can you effectively scale RPA across different business units?

To scale RPA across various business units, establish a centralized RPA governance model for standardization. Foster cross-functional collaboration and communication to identify automation opportunities. Develop a robust training program to empower teams with RPA skills. Ensure strong leadership support, and regularly assess and refine the RPA strategy based on feedback and performance metrics. Encourage a culture of innovation and continuous improvement to drive successful implementation and scalability across diverse business units.

To effectively scale Robotic Process Automation (RPA) across diverse business units, it's crucial to adopt a structured approach. Start by conducting a comprehensive assessment of each unit's processes to identify automation opportunities. Establish a centralized RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) to facilitate collaboration, standardization, and knowledge sharing across units. Develop a clear governance framework to ensure alignment with organizational goals and compliance requirements. Provide robust training and support to empower teams in implementing and maintaining automation solutions. Continuously measure performance metrics to track ROI and refine strategies for ongoing scalability and success

Document Automation is one of the critical capabilities for the successful Deployment of RPA solution. The difficulty was processing the documents with flexible layouts. This required training the Document extraction for each of the layouts and if the layout changes, the solution used to break. While lot has changed from the capability offered by key players addressing this issue, but Microsoft Azure cognitive services is truly a game changer solution. For example, you can leverage this service for invoice automation involving many receipts with different formats. You can extract the relevant details without training the model and use it for downstream consumption. This does offer huge scalability across Departments with no additional cost.

Standardize RPA tools and practices across business units by building elements that are reusable for simple tasks for maximized benefits (OCR to fill fields, validations, etc..). It is also important to set a COE Control Room for continuous performance monitoring to ensure scalability and sustained success. Regularly assess ROI and adjust the strategy based on cost-benefit analysis and evolving business needs for optimal scaling. Also, consider a list of backlog for RPA candidates to be reviewed cross-functionally to assess for mutual prioritization.

One of the things I've found helpful is that in order to ensure a smooth transition, communication is a vital key. It makes individuals feel that they belong and are part of a grand scheme of things to come.