Building your RPA Center of Excellence Dream Team
In one of the recent posts we shared how to get started and assess 5 critical points to kick start your automation journey. These points range from efficiency to cost savings to higher quality. One additional aspect for any enterprise organization is to have members of your future RPA center of excellence (CoE).
This is the hybrid team of business process gurus, enterprise architects and innovation leaders who will not only deliver your first process automation project but also teach other cross-functional RPA teams to duplicate their success.
Your RPA center of excellence team lineup will require a unique range of specialties and “home departments” to imagine, build and maintain your company’s process robots.
CoE Leadership Profiles
A successful automation program needs a broad vision, performance and consensus.
Sponsor to have clear RPA VISION
The CoE sponsor is the senior executive who initiates the program, inspires and advocates for the program, and provides executive leadership for the adoption of automation throughout the business. The executive sponsor may be in charge of IT, finance, operations or production.
Typically this is additional responsibility in addition to sponsor’s “day job,” he or she must be passionate about automation potential for improving costs, accuracy, and compliance and clear understanding of overall timelines, budgets and comparison with typical solution deployments.
Champion of RPA PERFORMANCE
The champion (Head of CoE Operations) can be a technology and/or operations leader, but either way, he or she must be a natural leader in innovation. The RPA champion is responsible for the health of the automation pipeline as well as building popular support among the user groups. The champion also must set and manage stakeholders’ expectations as to what the robots can accomplish.
Communication & Change Manager RPA CONSENSUS
Think of your CoE communication and change manager who can be a programmer of human interaction for automation projects, creating a change plan and employee communications roadmap for each of automation projects.
RPA Center of Excellence Dream Team
Solution Delivery
Business Analysts represent business operations as the process experts. These analysts identify and quantify the opportunities to automate revenue-generating tasks as well as regulatory, compliance or cost-saving processes.
These analysts are the CoE team members most likely to spot the manual repetitive business processes where RPA adds so much value. They may also be tasked with documenting legacy knowledge and experience associated with the transactions being automated.
Solution Architects operate at the heart of the RPA program, defining the solution architecture and protecting its end-to-end performance. Design and implement overall RPA technology architecture, define high level RPA rules, and he or she can design a robot to manage it in addition to provide guidance to team if developers.
Developers design, develop and test the automation artifacts. Please see case studies section for use cases and benefits other clients are getting.
Day-To-Day Operations
RPA COE team should also have Day-to-Day operations team which potentially should have RPA supervisor, Infrastructure Engineers, Administrator, and support specialists.
If an issue with a robot occurs, operations team will need to be able to quickly identify and address the issue without impacting back office performance and deadlines.
That’s why we recommend working with an RPA advisor or Managed Service Provider. An experienced RPA expert can support the launch of your CoE, helping its leaders identify where RPA makes sense and advising the RPA Supervisor on the ongoing monitoring and administrative support requirements for continuing performance.
Luceats team has extensive experience with developing RPA CoE for enterprises. Write an email at [email protected] to schedule an initial FREE consultation.
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