Week 11 | RPA

Question 1

What is RPA?

Answer 1

RPA is a software that sits on top of existing management systems

Question 2

What are the factors to consider when implementing RPA tasks?

Answer 2

Factors:
- Mature, well defined, high volume
- Operational and routine
- Structured and consistent labelling of input data source

Question 3

How can a change in the RPA factors affect the RPA process

Answer 3

If the work is not operational and routine, given that RPA is a software sitting on top of existing management system. If the system changes RPA is subject to refinement and change

If the task isn’t well structured and defined, then RPA as a robot cannot pick up from these errors and this would affect accuracy

Question 4

What is a real life application of RPA tasks?

Answer 4

• Bank reconciliation
• Processing supplier invoices
• Data manipulation e.g, transferring, merging and sorting and routing the data

Question 5

Why do we focus on only 4 stages of RPA

Answer 5

We focus on 4 stages because automatic planning is a more advanced learning.
potential solution:
- prove how first 4 stages are important

Question 6

What is the first stage of RPA processing

Answer 6

Automation Pipeline (has 3 components)

Candidate Identification: collecting information regarding the process such as number of employees performing the process manually, volume of task, repetitiveness etc

Top level benefit analysis
- adhering to regulatory compliance
- saving manual labour hours (repurposing employee time)
- improving customer satisfaction
- improving quality through error reduction
- streamline mission critical processes
- improve employee experience/morale

Candidate Prioritization: rank and sort automation candidate based on alignment with business priorities, manual dollar saved and annual labour hour saved

Question 7

What is the second stage of RPA?

Answer 7

Feasibility Analysis:
- consider both financial and technical feasibilities

Technical feasibility standpoint - basic criteria of a task that makes it suitable for automation includes:
- repetitive and rule based
- clearly defined input steps and outputs
- input consistency and standardised formats

Criterias preventing automation are:
- judgement calls
- fuzzy logic
- handwritten documents
- captcha codes

Question 8

What is the third stage of RPA?

Answer 8

Complexity assessment:
helps you determine development effort as well as the standardization effort needed for the automation. Following factors need to be assessed:

• manual hours involved
• personnel quantity
• departments
• technology landscape
• process steps
• data size
  main:
• business logic
• deployment
• standardize

Question 9

What is the fourth stage of RPA?

Answer 9

important to determine whether the automation provides any business value

revenue/cost savings in areas of:
- adhering to regulatory compliance
- improve in customer satisfaction
- improve quality through error reduction
- streamline mission critical processes
- improve employee experience/morale

costs of implementation:
- licensing
- infrastructure
- development and deployment
- maintenance and support
- training costs

Question 10

What happens if one of the stages don’t take place (which has the most impact)

Answer 10

stage 3 is where most projects get cut off and therefore have the most impact. If not conducted the unfeasible projects will progress to the next stage
potential answers:
- company wastes time and effort on ROI analysis
- standardisation and development efforts not determined
- understate company revenue