#2 Interviewing RPA Industry Leaders and Practitioners – Vinod Menon

-He is a Chartered Accountant with 20+ years of experience in Financial Services & Financial Technology, having worked in institutions, small enterprises & startups.

-He had a successful track record having received multiple accolades from large institutions both locally and globally. He was part of two successful financial technology startups having managed 12+ countries in the BFSI segment.

-His area of expertise is in Sales, Domain & RPA in the segments of technology around financial services & accounts. Currently, he provides consulting services in these areas to enterprises & tech startups and also provides training and coaching to employees and students in these areas.

-Currently, Vinod is actively involved in RPA providing Business Analysis, Process and Domain consulting, Training & Advisory services working with enterprises & technology companies in the successful rollout of RPA projects.

-When not at work Vinod is passionately building the community providing mentoring to young entrepreneurs and startups and is also a regular speaker at college events.

Small Talk

Sharath Raju:
For an enterprise what do you suggest as the starting point to embark on the RPA journey?

Vinod Menon:
As an enterprise if you want to explore RPA you need to do the following In case you have In house bandwidth

• Create a 2 member team to understand RPA. ( 1 Functional & 1 Technical member)
• Organize a training session for this team to get a reasonable grasp on RPA
• Interact with multiple market players to enhance the knowledge of this team so as to have a clear understanding of processes that can be automated, the cost, advantages of automation etc.
• Let the team work with 1 or 2 dept. and identify the list of processes that can be automated
• The team will Identify 2/3 processes where you would like to carry out the POC

Appoint external consultant

• A 2 member team will work with 1 or 2 dept. and identify the list of processes that can be automated.
• The team will Identify 2/3 processes where you would like to carry out the POC.

Sharath Raju:
Which is a better approach, to automate complex processes or automate less complex processes? 

Vinod Menon:
The following are the main criteria to be considered for selection of processes for an RPA implementation viz.

1. Rule Based – Processes which are consistent and rule based are the best ones
2. Electronic Data – The required input data is available in electronic format
3. Repetitive & Manual in nature – Processes which are repetitive and regular manual intervention
4. Time Consumption – Processes which take considerable amount of man hours

Sharath Raju:
How is the success of an RPA project determined ?

Vinod Menon:
Different measures are used to determine the success of the RPA project . However the best way is to compute the ROI.ROI is computed by reducing the savings on account of RPA from the cost of the RPA project implementation. The main savings from RPA could be on account of

1. Employee Cost – Cost saving due to freeing of resources as the specific task has been automated
2. Accuracy – Cost saving due to reduction in the error rate as bots can perform the task with zero error rate
3. Efficiency – Cost saving as resources deployed in other areas as bots can function 24/7

Compliance – As bots execute the tasks at the defined date and time and do not forget, the savings on account of penalty & fines

Sharath Raju:
How do we scale up the RPA project across the organisation?

Vinod Menon:
After the initial success of implementing RPA for selected process within a few departments, its time to scale up automation of process organisation wide. The key pointers for scaling up are as follows

• Setting up a Center of Excellence for RPA rollout which will take care of best practices, governance, technical and domain knowledge etc.
• Clarity of Purpose – Organisation should be clear on the purpose of automation and the same needs to be communicated across with active engagement of relevant stake holders
• Execution plan – All the relevant parties need to be on the same page as fat as RPA implementation is concerned be it the IT team, implementation team, business team etc.
• Continuous Feedback – Constant feedback loop to be provided to the COE team and the C Suite on the progress, challenges, wins, losses etc. of the RPA project. Typically enterprises engage with a strong 3^rd party integration provider who will ensure that all relevant stake holders are constantly updated and actions are taken at the right time