#3 Interviewing RPA Industry Leaders and Practitioners – Shailesh Gohel

I have Shailesh Gohel with us today to share his thoughts on Robotic Process Automation, and it’s been a pleasure talking to him 🙂

He has a “magic” effect that makes people like him, and he’s always ready to help…

Here is a short Bio:

Small Talk

Sharath Raju:
What would be the starting point for RPA implementation in a company?

Shailesh Gohel:

A successful RPA implementation starts with identifying right processes, setting up a small team of inhouse RPA developers along with external consultant(S) to create a POC/Pilot.

First step for any company for RPA implementation is to identify right processes, processes those fall into below criteria.

1. Processes those yield the major benefits once automated i.e. Business critical processes which have major impact on revenue like Quote-to-Cash.
2. Processes those are easy to automate like Rule based, with low exception rate and are mature.

Along with this, there is also a need to identify “as-is” and “to-be” processes. With “to-be” processes, there will be some processes which require some change to have a right RPA implementation.

Sharath Raju:
What is the biggest mistake that we end up doing while adopting RPA?

Shailesh Gohel:

While adopting RPA, the biggest mistakes might happen at different levels – Organization level, Process identification level or Implementation level.

Organization Level:

• No clear RPA strategy.
• Lake of support from admin, HR, IT, Front/Backoffice etc. – These departments has the FTEs for which RPA is being implemented.

Process Identification Level:

• Selecting a process that changes frequently.
• Process that have insignificant business impact
• Process which is not so repetitive or is not cost effective.

Implementation Level:

• Choosing a framework/tool that requires too much programming.
• Lack of scalability

Sharath Raju:
How can an organization benefit by adopting RPA in terms of ROI, Efficiency and Error rate?

Shailesh Gohel:

Key benefits of implementing RPA is increased work efficiency.
Work that takes hours can be finished in few minutes with RPA robots. Also robots can work 24×7 that gives great productivity. Along with this, most of the RPA processes are rule based that gives 100% work accuracy once implemented correctly, where in manual work there are chances of having error in work done as we human are bound to make mistakes.

On the cost part, most of the time a company can achieve their ROI within 1-3 years of RPA implementation.

The following factors such as great work efficiency with zero error, shorter ROI period etc. gives company multiple benefits – Cost reduction of FTE, Back office staff working in frontline with great work satisfaction, liberty to adopt new customers/projects, digital audit trail etc.

Sharath Raju:
How important is analytics in RPA?

Shailesh Gohel:
Analytics is one of the important part in RPA. Most of the RPA tools already provides great analytics dashboard with which one can monitor multiple things like Bot performance, Process completion progress and efficiency, Overall infrastructure heath etc.This will help management and leadership to make decision on ROI, further plans to scale business etc.