How Adding a Process Analyst to Your ROM Team Can Help You Scale (and Reduce Costs)

Blue Prism’s Robotic Operating Model (ROM) is a strategic framework composed of standards, guides and templates, which our customers have helped us refine and enhance over many years. We provide you with advice and guidance on how to successfully implement intelligent automation across the organization.

A ROM team can bring a string of benefits to your business, from a rapid and repeatable approach to process delivery communication, control and company-wide visibility to overall time savings, cost efficiencies and improved productivity. As the digital workforce is incorporated throughout your organization, you can rapidly adapt and react to the ever-changing needs of your business and your customer.

The ROM is built on seven foundations, each of which supports the implementation of a digital workforce as part of transformational change across an enterprise:

1. Vision

Create a vision for your digital workforce based on organizational strategy and goals that support long-term intelligent automation success.

2. Organization

Defining the organizational design that best supports delivery of your robotic process automation (RPA) capability and aligns with your corporate strategy and culture.

3. Governance and pipeline

Assess and select processes to build a sustainable automation pipeline and implement governance for a controlled and secured digital workforce.

4. Delivery methodology

Define the optimal delivery approach and embed policies for rapid and efficient automation in a structured, controlled and repeatable manner.

5. Service model

Support operational processes while defining the management, reporting, scheduling and referral handling processes for business as usual.

6. People

Build teams with the appropriate roles and skills to help build and run a successful digital workforce.

7. Technology

Define a highly scalable technical architecture and the associated growth strategies to generate maximum business benefit.

The combination of these foundational principles will enable your ROM team to build a stable, yet flexible, framework to guide a successful automation journey.

However, in order to get the most from your new ROM team and scale at speed, it’s wise to consider adding a process analyst as well. After all, RPA and intelligent automation are all about process optimization in the pursuit of business benefits, so an expert process analyst can help maximize those pluses.

The role of the process analyst

A process analyst can clearly capture the detailed requirements for process automation. This person documents process definitions, supports testing and can ensure processes are reusable, resilient and scalable. This means that the overall time frame, delivery costs and maintenance overheads are all reduced. So, beyond the initial benefits, having a process analyst involved at an early stage can also help ensure potentially exponential returns by instilling new, agile processes that evolve with the nature and size of your business.

Choosing the right processes for automation is the key to unlocking maximum benefit from RPA. There are two important elements to consider when making these choices:

Discovery

Define the opportunity assessment approach and pipeline triage procedure to optimize the number of processes selected for automation and maximize the associated business benefit.

Technology

Identify a scalable, low-maintenance technical environment, as well as security policies and access models, to allow your ROM team to operate in a controlled environment. By creating processes and objects that are reusable, any changes can be implemented once then cascade through other processes that use the same object.

Not having an IT infrastructure in place that’s scalable and secure means potential issues around growth could arise in the future, so you need to think big from the start. Adding a process analyst tasked with identifying the areas of your infrastructure most ripe for optimization can help with this.

Process analysts are experts at studying what makes a process tick and testing solutions. They can come on board to make sure the automation journey gets off to a productive start and lays the groundwork for sustainable scalability and ROI.

Having an expert eye involved in the discovery stage of your journey can mean the difference between intelligent automation and automation for automation’s sake. You’ll come away with a much greater insight into what works for your business and what doesn’t and where the true value of your employees lies. They’ll be able to pinpoint processes that aren’t delivering for your human workforce or your customers and identify ways to further optimize the ones that are.

By combining this insight with the power of RPA, you can deploy digital workers and well-prepared human employees together in a hybrid approach that has been shown to offer massive potential business benefits, including cost efficiency, increased productivity and better customer satisfaction.

Making the most of intelligent automation

Using Blue Prism’s ROM will enable you to deploy a scalable foundation for your digital workforce. This foundation will make it easier to create more opportunities for intelligent automation throughout your enterprise. A ROM informed by the insights of a process analyst enables seamless deployment of complementary technologies as part of the RPA stack. It also creates and expands a robust pipeline of processes to continually drive business benefits.

As more and more businesses look to accelerate existing digital transformation projects by utilizing rapid deployment intelligent automation—particularly in the wake of the digital migration inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic—the role of a process analyst will become integral to its successful implementation.

Further reading:

• 5 Steps to Scaling Automation Strategically
• Scaling and Sustaining a Business Model with RPA
• RPA in 2020: Where's it Going and How Did We Get Here?
• Five Pitfalls That Will Prevent Your RPA Initiative from Reaching Scale