What Are the Key Challenges for RPA Implementation?

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are poised to transform the global digital landscape by delivering a host of outcomes. These include minimizing costs, increasing productivity and efficiency, developing insights into business processes, mitigating risks, identifying bugs, enhancing multichannel compatibility, enhancing responsiveness, and increasing revenue, among others. Since 2014, RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, has become a vital cog in the wheel of businesses aiming to get a competitive advantage. By mimicking humans, RPA testing services can perform tedious and repetitive testing tasks that are a considerable challenge to manual testers.

Businesses failing to harness this advanced technology run the risk of falling behind. Hence, robotic process automation to be implemented and made an integral part of the value chain of companies. This can let human resources focus on more pressing tasks requiring ingenuity and application of mind. Nonetheless, despite the opportunities provided by RPA QA services, there are numerous challenges. In the below-mentioned segment, we take you through RPA and the challenges it entails.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is a technology that mimics humans and uses automation to perform voluminous and complex tasks quickly, comprehensively, precisely, and more efficiently than its human counterparts. It helps human resources focus on other critical areas where applying intelligence is needed. Interestingly, RPA is not confined to any particular industry or vertical but can be applied across business enterprises and sectors, thereby benefiting all stakeholders.

Key challenges for RPA implementation

The key challenges that organizations may face while implementing RPA include:

• Managing employee resistance: Any change in technology and associated processes can be stressful for employees because they must transition from working in a familiar framework to something they are unfamiliar with. The unfamiliarity may breed fear, wariness, and even resentment. To ensure that the new technology is implemented smoothly, management must communicate clearly and inform everyone about the benefits it will bring to the business. If the responsibilities and expected goals were known across the organization before the implementation of the technology, the resistance to change would have been reduced.
• Unrealistic expectations: By automating specific, high-volume, and repetitive processes, loads of benefits can be derived by businesses. However, it needs to be kept in mind that not all processes in the organization can be adapted to RPA, especially in the first cycle. Any robotic process software testing should be done step by step and not rushed. It is important to know the processes inside and out and their hierarchy before RPA is implemented.
• Automating the appropriate process: Because not every process in an organization is amenable to automation, it is critical to choose the right one for implementation based on predictive rules and standardization. For instance, selecting a stable, high-volume, repetitive, and rule-based process with less manual intervention and errors can be the ideal one for automation. Also, it is important to know if the process can show measurable savings for the organization. Once the initial hiccups vis-a-vis automating the first process are addressed, the rest can fall into place.
• Owning change management: When implementing an RPA testing strategy, there should be clear guidelines on who owns change management (the business or the IT team). In fact, both business and IT teams should be onboard vis-a-vis RPA. The former should set realistic goals to streamline processes and achieve growth, while the latter should ensure proper implementation of use cases across the organization.
• Maintenance and review: Since RPA solutions implemented by RPA testing services need to be evaluated periodically, businesses must create a plan for maintenance and review. An in-house team needs to be set up to review the progress of RPA implementation. The team would track the challenges, communicate the same to the stakeholders, come up with appropriate solutions, and use them to address the challenges. The maintenance of the RPA process should be shouldered by all decision-makers in the organization.

Conclusion

As stated above, RPA implementation can be accompanied by a host of challenges or issues, which need to be identified and addressed immediately. Robotic process automation has the capability to eliminate issues that can arise due to the routine running of processes involving high volumes of data. Remember, the competitive advantages offered by any RPA testing framework can far outweigh the challenges provided it is properly implemented.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.