#1 Interviewing RPA Industry Leaders and Practitioners – Sahil Sharma

And I have Sahil Sharma with us to share his thoughts on the RPA industry, and I would like to thank him for taking up some time.

Small Talk

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

Sahil Sharma:
For any company, they need to evaluate their current processes  as the first and foremost step in their RPA journey

1. Perform scoping on their current business processes to check if they are standardized and if not, can they be standardized?

2. If they are standardized, evaluate the vendors of RPA in the marketplace that suits their needs in terms of capabilities and licensing costs

3. Then calculate Return on Investments (ROI) for such standardized use cases after subtracting the RPA infrastructure, Licensing and FTE costs

4. If the ROI in 2-3 years is significant, begin the processes of establishing a Center of Excellence to begin the RPA journey.

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

Sahil Sharma:
Not scaling properly. Most companies try to continue with the initially established team, but that causes problems in the long run as the number of bots grows exponentially once the ball of RPA starts rolling

As the use cases grow, proper teams need to be organized and maintained to provide L1 support for existing bots, while growing their base team of RPA developers, Architects and Infrastructure correspondingly.

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

Sahil Sharma:
RPA allows improvements in all 3 areas

Tasks which usually took hours or even days in some cases can be finished in mere minutes! Thereby providing excellent ROI and Efficiency to the organization

Also since RPA operates on a rule-based logic, as long as the rules are correct and there are no external factors like environmental /software changes, it will always deliver accurate results.

Humans are prone to make mistakes, while RPA can ensure the clients get Error Free work delivered every single time and perform tasks 24/7.

Sharath Raju:
How important is analytics in RPA?

Sahil Sharma:
It is a very crucial component of RPA in my opinion. Unless you can analyze the performance of your bots and the benefits they offer the organization, it is a challenge to convince the higher management

This is usually because of the high infrastructure costs involved with RPA. But when you have the  data to showcase in terms of hours saved and  accuracy achieved, it’s hard to deny the pros of RPA

It also helps in monitoring the health of the robots, systems and helps in identifying areas of further improvement as well, even for the processes themselves many times!