Surprisingly, many organizations well into their automation journeys are yet to set up an RPA CoE (center of excellence). This could be one reason why RPA (robotic process automation) is arguably past the peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle, and slowly heading towards the next stop: the trough of disillusionment.
It's well-documented that RPA projects fail to deliver on their objectives, meaning automation teams are finding themselves unable to scale RPA and generate the anticipated ROI. One of the main reasons automation projects "fail" is because large organizations are inadvertently running islands of automation: siloed teams designing, planning, and deploying automations independently in specific lines of businesses or departments. Islands of automation cause inefficiency, an absence of knowledge sharing, and most importantly, a damaging cycle of duplicating mistakes that drive up costs from rework and RPA downtime.
One of the most effective ways of improving stagnating RPA projects is to establish an RPA CoE.
An RPA Center of Excellence is a dedicated cross-functional team responsible for identifying and deploying automated processes enterprise-wide. At their core, CoEs consolidate and harmonize automation initiatives for an entire business, ensuring you are meeting your RPA implementation's business objectives. They do this by gathering, assessing, and managing the necessary knowledge and capabilities needed to implement RPA effectively. They are also charged with a mandate to standardize, govern, and evangelize automation across the organization. To that end, RPA CoEs also provide training and define best practices, distributing this information across the enterprise to ensure that all automations are drivers for key business objectives.
RPA Centers of Excellence respond to a major problem; organizations are hitting automation roadblocks. RPA just isn't delivering the projected ROI defined at implementation, bringing to question the overall investment.
The reason? A maverick, self-interested approach to automation where each line of business fends for itself, causing poor planning, design, and missed requirements that lead to bot outages and unavailability. When bots have to be pulled out of production for maintenance, they're not executing the processes they were built to execute. The diminished returns causing RPA projects to "fail" are in large part attributable to RPA downtime, and ultimately the result of reactive, unplanned rework.
RPA CoEs can remove the barriers and challenges stunting high-quality, resilient automation development.
Fundamentally, CoEs are a central governance structure that provides the alignment, knowledge, and collaboration needed to foster high-quality development and resilient bots. An RPA CoE is what gets everyone moving in the same direction, maximizing bot availability. They are also the best governance model to enable shared ownership of automation between IT and the business; this has proved to be the optimal distribution of ownership.
RPA CoEs are meant to be the vehicles that establish a centralized automation governance model for the entire enterprise. Beyond just defining one consolidated toolchain, they also need the tools that foster the alignment and collaboration that facilitate high-quality automation design and delivery at an enterprise scale.
Blueprint is the most powerful automation design environment available on the market that is purpose-built for RPA CoEs. Blueprint's Enterprise Automation Suite sits in the middle of your automation toolchain. It delivers the automation design, planning, risk analysis, and change management capabilities that an RPA CoE demands but can't find in any other solution. Blueprint also offers effortless RPA platform migration allowing you to eliminate islands of automation with the native ability to migrate all bots into one, consolidated RPA tool.
As your automation command center, Blueprint's Enterprise Automation Suite provides one centralized repository where all automation stakeholders can collaborate to identify, optimize, and prioritize automation work which is automatically packaged into a Digital Blueprint; the new, unique method to design and plan automations that drives high-quality development for maximum bot availability.
Watch the short demo video below to discover how Blueprint can enable your RPA CoE to drive high-quality automations that maximize your returns or get in touch with one of our solution architects today.