Phases in Delivering process automation solution RPA

In this article, we will see what are the different phases in delivering a process automation solution in RPA.

The different key phases in delivering process automation are listed below:

• Idea
• Feasibility Study
• Process Improvements
• RPA Development
• Acceptance Testing
• Moving to production
• Support & Maintenance

Let’s talk about the individual phases and their importance in delivering process automation.

Idea:

This is where everything will start for automation of a process.

Maybe it is your company or your client company who finds a repetitive process.

Someone always execute the same steps every day in your office.

Now, from here the idea of automating process begins.

After fixing which process to be automated it moves to the next phase Feasibility study.

Feasibility Study:

After identifying a process in which you need automation. It’s time to have some feasibility study around that process automation.

Some of the factors that need to be considered is:

• ROI- Return on Investment
• Automation Costs- What will be your Investment for automating a process.

The best process automation can be achieved only when there are no broken links to the process.

What does mean by broken links?

The process should be executed at once and no need for any other interruptions in between the automation.

Particularly the messages we usually see to check the checkboxes whether you are a robot or not and also the selecting the displayed images.

All these things are involved in the Feasibility study which gives the business user a good overview of costs and ROI.

After completing this phase we will move to the next phase which is Process Improvement.

Process Improvement:

This is also the most important phase before building the bots which automate the process.

After seeing the process you need to find out some key areas where you can simplify the process.

Which makes it easy for the bot to execute the process automation.

This is the area where business analysts and rpa developers will give some suggestions or the process improvements which will make the automation much smoother.

In this phase, we also collect all the required specifications of the applications or the web browsers that are included in this process automation.

With this done then we will move into a building or developing the bots to automate the process.

In this phase, the final part is preparing a Process Definition Document(PDD) for the process and this will be the draft PDD which will be optimized in the future if there any changes while developing the bots.

RPA Development:

After finishing the Partial drafted PDD for the process the rpa developer or his team will start working on developing this.

Firstly, they will complete the happy path(which is usually an end to end process without any negative scenarios) of the process and see if they are able to complete this successfully or facing any unexpected challenges.

If everything is going well and well with the happy path scenario then they will test with negative scenarios which we call Business exceptions where the process needs to end without reaching to end of the normal process which the bot usually does.

All this development will take place in a system where the specifications of applications are similar to production.

We normally call that as NPE(Non Production Environment).

If you don’t develop the process in an environment similar to production then that would become a rework for the developer to redesign the bot in a production environment.

After completing this phase we will move into Acceptance testing.

Acceptance Testing:

When the bot is completely developed and ready to move to production.

This becomes the vital phase where the developed bot is tested for more test data and evaluates the accuracy and the process steps that the bot is performing is according to the PDD or any steps that are missing in the process.

If the steps are missing then the Business analyst will again update the PDD and the development team will complete the development.

After completing the development then the bot will go through this phase again to get approval from the business users.

If there are no changes and everything looks good then that will be the final draft for the PDD to get the signoff from the business users which will be taken care of by the RPA Business Analyst.

Now we will move into next phase which is Moving to Production.

Moving To Production:

There is no guide or steps that you can follow while moving the bot to production.

In the simpler process, you might not be that focused but for the complex process while moving to production you have to be cautious about every single option that you need change for a production environment.

The last and key phase of this delivery process is Support and Maintenance.

Support & Maintenance:

The process for which the bot is created to automate is not the final version of it because there are so many reasons why the bots fail in production.

• Slowness of Applications
• Unexpected errors

Some person has to watch it automate for some days to see everything is working fine or need to modify the code or to change the navigation steps for reaching that page or screen.

Then the PDD document is also updated if the process steps are changing.

These are key phases in delivering a process automation in RPA.

Happy Learning!