3 Steps to Get Buy In For RPA in 2024

The RPA software market revenue is estimated to reach $1.8B by the end of 2021, and a Deloitte survey revealed that 53% of organizations have already started their RPA journey. However, convincing your business leaders and decision makers to get RPA into your company may be a difficult task. In this article, we explore 3 steps to get RPA buy in and how to convince economic buyers and influencers to invest in automation solutions. 

Step 1: Get buy-in from decision makers

Knowing the processes to be automated and their ROI and possible benefits from automation, you can build a compelling case for company leadership. It’s been estimated that automating repetitive business tasks via RPA offers a potential ROI of 30–200% within the first year alone.

Step 2: Get buy-in from teams that will be impacted by RPA

Are you automating an in-house process or an out-sourced process? If it is an outsourced process, you are essentially just bringing in savings and the team managing the outsourced process will likely be happy to manage the automated process.

However, it is a completely different situation with an in-house team. No one wants to wake up one day and discover that their job is redundant. It is necessary to have an open and honest discussion with the team about what automation will bring. Some points to cover are:

• Convince the team of the change. It is easy to say and hard to do. Unless you have strong management support, it can be impossible to convince teams about the need for automation.
• Design the new, leaner team
• Formulate post-automation steps like how redundant team members will be upskilled and which teams they can join.

Step 3: Convince other business units and stakeholders

• IT/technology is the most important stakeholder as IT should be approving major tech purchases from a technical perspective. The important questions to ask are?
  • Did we buy any RPA technology before? For a list to check against, you can refer procurement to our list of RPA companies. If there were previous RPA projects, then it is best to learn who the vendor was, outcome of the RPA roll-out and learn from previous experience.
  • What are the major planned changes in the tech stack? For example, if the organization will work with Citrix in the next year, it is best to complete the RPA Proof of Concept (PoC) on Citrix.
• RPA Center of Excellence (CoE): Most large organizations are setting up centers of excellence for RPA. CoEs would need to be involved in RPA projects.
• Data/Analytics: Bots leave traces for every action they complete. Working with a data/analytics unit to ensure that bots create valuable and easy to use data can save RPA teams from a lot of headaches down the road.
• HR: If RPA is going to play an important role in your organization, it is important to train the staff on RPA. This enables the company’s own staff to be empowered to maintain existing RPA programs and roll-out new programs.

For more on RPA implementation

To explore RPA in depth, read our comprehensive articles about:

• 20 RPA Benefits Compiled from Top Sources
• Top 100+ RPA Use Cases / Projects / Applications/ Examples

And explore our in-depth whitepaper on the topic:

And if you want to explore RPA implementation steps, read our in-depth articles on:

• Identify and Prioritize Processes to Automate with RPA
• 11 Steps to Prepare and Implement RPA Successfully
• 6-Step Guide to Best Practices of RPA Implementation
• 5 Ways to Measure RPA Post Solution Success

And if you want to invest in an off-the-shelf RPA solution, check our data-driven list of RPA vendors, and explore other automation solutions in our comprehensive hub.

And we can guide you through the process:

This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Alamira Jouman Hajjar.