8 Outrageous Reasons why your Bank’s Process Automation FAILS! , #8 Will Insure Your Success!
One of the main pillars of digital transformation is automation, and to be precise it’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA). When it comes to such an initiative, many companies fail to execute such projects, and this is due to many issues which I’ll go over them in details in this article. I believe that such projects will enhance the company’s overall capabilities, and thus enhance the maturity of the corporate, and control and lower its overall expenses.
So, here are the main reasons that cause such initiatives to fail:
1- No Clear processes: Automation, in general, depends directly on the corporate internal processes and their maturity. But, if your corporate processes are ill-defined or they are not set clearly to the employees and vendors (3rd party engagements), then the possibilities of building and executing such an automated process will be unachievable.
My advice is to have a clear vision of the type of processes that need to be automated and then, start automating such processes. I believe we don’t need to have ALL of the processes set and defined right from the beginning, but you’ll need some processes ready to be automated. Otherwise, you’ll end up waiting for a long period of time until all processes are defined and used.
2- No Technical Clarity: I believe having a technical ability is a key enabler to such projects, otherwise you’ll end up at the mercy of your vendors. In such cases, having the ability to understand and evaluate the capabilities of the needed tools and mapping them to your needs is crucial for the success of such projects. It’s important to understand that there is NO ONE SIZE fits all type of deal when it comes to process automation.
3- Lack of commitment: When it comes to such projects, full dedication needs to be given to such an initiative. Otherwise, such projects will end up failing. Such projects will require; technical expertise, such expertise needs to cover both the business processes and the technical technology aspect of the project. Moreover, a proper budget, scope, and timeframe need to be decided right at the beginning of such projects.
RESISTANCE is one of the main reasons why some corporations lack the proper commitment, and the reason behind this resistance is the fear of job security after the completion of such projects.
4- Changing processes: It’s important when starting such a project to lock up your processes, otherwise this project will fail due to scope creep. In other words, you don’t want the process/scope of this project to continually change. You can enhance such processes in the future and cooperate with such changes in your future project enhancement, or create a CR change request to accommodate such changes.
5- Complex cognitive tasks: Some tasks could be extremely complex and require a lot of manual human intervention. For such tasks, you’ll need to make sure to jot down all of the required steps, in order to ensure a full coverage of the process. Then you can start the automation of such a process, finally you should run it in attended mode. By running it in attended mode, you’ll get the RPA ML “Machine Learning” to learn all of the possible logical steps for this process.
6- Poor strategies or Tools: When it comes to RPAs, it’s important to have a clear overall strategy of what you want to accomplish. Meaning, you’ll need to understand your corporate Value Chain fully, and then build a strategy to address your customer needs first, then your internal process. Once you understand your corporate Value Chain fully, then you can start drawing your vertical and horizontal processes and their intersects. Plus, you can evaluate each vertical (and horizontal lines of business) from the front-end systems — to the middle systems — all the way to the back end systems.
( Referrence: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/the-transformative-power-of-automation-in-banking# )
As for the tools, there are a lot of tools to choose from, but I rather select a tool that fits my requirements and needs. Plus, such a tool needs to be able to integrate and interact with your systems with ease. I’ll be discussing this item in further details in the future.
7- Lack of communication: Enterprise automation processes require the involvement of all of the departments, and it will require all of the involved SMEs to support such an initiative. In large organizations, it’s very difficult to quantify the list of processes. Thus, it’s critical to have a clear and open communication channel between all team members. Such members will need to quantify the processes that need to be automated, their prioritization shall be based on their qualitative and quantitative analysis.
8- Lack of KPIs: Key Performance Indicators are critical to evaluating the overall success of such projects, this way you’ll need to measure and quantify the number of automated processes and the overall throughput of such processes during certain time period. Subsequently, its critical to measure your overall financial impact of such initiative, and it’s short-term and long-term impact on the corporate human resources. When it comes to KPIs, its important to be able to assess the previous KPI measurements, current and based on the KPI outcome try to predict the future KPI outcome.
It’s important to note; the re-alignment of the current corporate resources is a very critical aspect to be discussed and inspected throughout such initiatives. Some resources need to be trained and transferred to different units in order for them to survive such a change.
