5 Things You Can Do to Failproof Your Automation Program

As organizations double down on their digital transformation efforts post-pandemic, RPA adoption is accelerating. Gartner stated that RPA revenue would touch $2 Billion in 2021, an increase of almost 20% from 2020. The business case for RPA is strong – who doesn’t want to improve efficiencies, scale faster, and reduce costs? Yet, 30% to 50% of the RPA projects fail! While Selecting the right process to automate and implementing the requisite automation practices are critical; establishing a support system for automation is equally important. Often the support and maintenance for automation are downplayed in the excitement of adopting automation. To continue delivering consistent service excellence to customers, a focus on automation operational sustenance is essential.
Typical Oversights That Hinder Operational Sustenance

If your automation programs have been giving you heartburn, ask yourself the following questions. You would see that these would have played a major role in hindering operational sustenance.

1. Do your bots fall sick?
   Yes, automation breakdown happens more often than you think and impacts user experience. Bot performance decreases with time due to changes in application parameters or substandard design and implementation.
2. Do all your bots perform the same?
   No. Lagging focus on operational sustenance creates inconsistencies in bot performance. What you get is missed SLAs and failed processes.
3. Do your bots have a plan B?
   Limited or no alternate processing options owing to the lack of planning for automation failures in the design phase makes bot failure a dead end for users.
4. Are your bots well supported?
   Support needs for every organization are unique and require a team suited to the organization’s ecosystem. How well your bots need to be supported will also depend on automation maturity and the availability of IT support for the application and infrastructure.
5. Did your team get the memo?
   Support, business users, and IT app teams are often not on the same page during the design and RPA deployment, leading to complex change management and leaving the users and the automated systems out of sync.
6. How soon can you recover from bot failure?
   Recovery depends on your teams’ capability in responding to issues quickly. A competent team can speed up analysis and adopt DevOps to respond faster.

Automation Run Centre for Assured Sustenance
Assuring Automation Operational Sustenance requires a thought-through approach. Here are five things you can do to operationalize this assurance mechanism :

1. Get the right crew in place
   A skilled and structured team can make all the difference to automation performance by ensuring SLA adherence, managing periodic spikes, and overall stability of the application ecosystem. A combination of bot and platform specialists and generalists, coupled with a well-knit support framework and governance, guarantees support, service, and availability, making automation flawless.
2. Accept the best, reject the rest
   A rigorous onboarding framework with gold standards in design, development, and testing reduces bot failures and ensures consistent performance. Take out the subjectivity of manual assessments by using automated code reviews and validation plugins etc.
3. Measure, monitor and pre-empt
   By process criticality, enlist desired processing parameters, complementing parameters, and support coverage needed right at the time of onboarding. Set automated monitors to affirm healthy processing terms. Leverage Auto Detection Change Engines to pre-empt breakdowns for critical processes. Collaborate with the process owners and automation product owners to create business continuity plans, workarounds, and recovery procedures within runbooks.
4. Close the communication chasm
   Embed the Automation Run Team into the Change Approval board. This ensures that this team is consulted for all application changes, and the run team has had a chance to review the impact on the bot. Maintain the communication and escalation protocol to ensure that the right stakeholders are engaged in case of an issue.
5. Innovate and accelerate
   Expand your ability to respond to anomalies, by developing accelerators and enablers to speed up monitoring, reporting, and analysis. A DevOps regimen will be an added advantage.

At SLK, we offer Automation Run Center (ARC) as a bespoke service to our clients to enable enterprises with assured operational sustenance. We bring in our exhaustive automation service delivery expertise across the automation spectrum – Automation Strategy, Process Discovery, Automation Build, and ARC, in turn reinforcing every phase and assuring value to our clients and their customers. Want to know more about ARC? Write to us at [email protected]

Authored by Gireesh Ullody