But the benefits go beyond the financial ones; consider rapid scalability to demand spikes, headcount flexibility, improved risk, compliance, and audit management. Perhaps the most important consequence of automation is a human-centered way of doing business, which makes both the customers and the employees more satisfied with improved services and by higher-value tasks, respectively.

If you are still at the beginning of your automation journey and you feel a little out of your depth in the attempt to deal efficiently with the challenges to implementing RPA, we wrote an ebook meant to assist you in making savvy implementation decisions.

RPA implementation challenges and how to overcome them

1. Starting with reasonable expectations

Given the RPA hype, it is easy to fall prey to an over-enthusiastic perspective. But keeping your feet on the ground is crucial because of the large-scale impact on the assessment of the outcomes of automation, and hence, on subsequent decisions regarding scaling up to enterprise level. A helpful way to do this is to start with a clear hierarchy of business objectives, and then figure out how exactly RPA can help to attain them.

2. Managing employees’ resistance

The “robots will steal our jobs” narrative, often used as a typical robotic process automation objection, is the core reason for the staff’s lack of willingness to accept new technologies.

Prior to engaging in the automation project, you should educate them regarding what software robots can and cannot do, and help them understand that the bots are to be seen as helping, and not as hindering, the current work roles. Moreover, you should invest in training employees regularly, as the ‘automation era’ will likely require them to acquire new skills.

3. Picking the most appropriate processes to begin a successful automation journey

We’ve discussed this before, not all processes are suitable for automation. We’ve published an article containing 8 questions to ask about processes before implementing RPA.

You should identify processes with clear processing instructions (template driven), based on standardised and predictive rules. Processes that require a high degree of manual input, structured and repetitive input involve activities that are more susceptible to human error; this is why they are also good candidates for automation.

Another idea to be considered in the selection process is that the more stable a business task, the more smooth and effective (and thus cost-efficient) its automated version. Relatedly, processes with measurable savings will make it easier to evaluate realistically the impact of RPA on your company.