Impress your business bosses by writing Use Cases for RPA
Many organizations are looking for ways to improve efficiency and are looking at RPA (Robotic Process Automation) as a solution that can be applied. There are many tools available to make life easy and the list of areas where automation can be applied is endless. Most persons today are familiar with bots, short for ‘robots’ that work effortlessly in the background for you by doing repeated tasks. A common usage is a chat bot which you interact, that gives you predefined answers based on a predefined common question set. As a business, you are constantly looking for ways to save money and automation must have crossed your mind several times. A starting point is to write use cases for RPA. This however is not an easy task. Implementing automation is a costly affair – buying reliable automation software, having the right technical persons to support and implement the solution. All situations do not lend themselves to the path of automation as you must be able to justify the cost/benefits of the implementation. Choosing a business case over another is critical – based on must-have, urgency, customer satisfaction or increase in sales among a myriad of decisions that come up before implementing and choosing ‘What to Implement?’
Framing a good problem statement is the most essential part of the success of an RPA implementation. How well you frame a question is directly proportional to getting the best answer. In the field of Operations Research, the utmost importance is given to framing a question, which lends to giving out an elegant solution while setting boundaries, which in a purely business sense is a specific re-occurrence or an event in specific circumstances. For example, sending a price list to a customer who has requested it, scanning an invoice and posting it in a ledger, pay out employee expenses weekly based on bills submitted, etc., The list is endless. However all lists are not equal and as an organization you want to implement where it makes the most sense financially, and in some cases where you want to attract more business by focusing on a superior customer experience.
Let us look at a simple use case presented below.
Well, now that you have decided on a format, you may add details that you send to your higher ups. We have 40 operators, bring down AHT by 200% viz. 4:30 minutes to 1:30 thus saving and giving a better customer experience. Total savings in a month is X. Thus you have presented an excellent business case which goes through the normal process of budget approval and so forth.
Here is another example
Though the example above is for IT professionals handling tickets, it can easily be expanded to a customer complains group. You can easily see the benefits of an enhanced customer experience.
To summarize, it is easy to write use cases for RPA as you are the frontline person who is experiencing the problems on a day-to-day basis. The examples and advise in this article is to get you started – not the end all – your own business may be much more complicated and may require to be more exact and detailed. You are the most qualified person to write them – don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. It takes practice and patience to get it right like every other skill. You can make a career for yourself, for identifying use cases that helps organizations save money – leading to better efficiency. Implementation takes time, and you may be guided initially, but you will learn from those experiences. Learning to use automation tools/software like UIPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism does not require major effort and can be mastered in a short time. Always be on the lookout in your organization to find things to automate – you will be rewarded – firstly to yourself and your organization and the pride and sense of accomplishment that comes with it.
Authored by Vijay Chander – All rights Reserved 2022
