3 Steps To Build a Successful RPA Center of Excellence in 2024

The global RPA market is projected to reach $12B by 2025, and there is an increasing adoption of RPA for automating different business processes.

However, deploying more RPA bots to automate processes requires more time, monetary, and effirt investment.

This is why RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) is becoming one of the top RPA trends. RPA CoEs enable businesses to develop an organization-wide RPA strategy as well as scale and standardize RPA solutions.

In this article, we explore what RPA CoE is, how to create one, and best practices.

Why do businesses need an RPA CoE?

An RPA CoE is a centralized point of collaboration about ongoing RPA implementation and strategy deployment in an organization. It enables employees of different skills and levels to innovate, improve, deploy, and measure the success of RPA.

RPA CoE provides business leaders with the ability to:

• Design and maintain reusable bots: Different business functions can be automated using a single bot.
  • For example, a reporting RPA bot can be used to generate reports in HR, finance, and customer service.
  • RPA developers in a CoE can design and deploy reusable RPA bots across different departments, cutting the time and cost of automation.
• Scale RPA solutions: Different business departments may choose different RPA products to automate their processes, causing difficulties in scaling across the organization.
  • Having a single unit for RPA development ensures that the entire organization is leveraging the same RPA product, integrations, and RPA plugins, thus, enabling robust and scalable bot development.
• Monitor and track performance: An RPA CoE provides a centralized point to overview all RPA bots across the organization, test all RPA tools, monitor their performance, detect bugs and inconsistencies, identify security breaches, and enforce organization policies.

What is an RPA CoE framework?

RPA CoE is a centralized business unit responsible for deploying, standardizing, and maintaining RPA solutions across different business areas.

An RPA CoE typically includes:

1. RPA strategy leaders who are responsible for establishing and executing an RPA implementation strategy. Leaders can either be company employees with previous experience in RPA projects, or third party RPA consultants.
2. RPA analysts who are responsible for:
   • Not all processes are suitable for RPA automation. RPA analysts can determine and prioritizie the right business tasks for automation. Businesses can leverage process mining and process discovery tools to analyze business tasks and explore automation opportunities.
   • Creating the roadmap and steps of implementation. The steps will include:
     • Getting RPA buy in
     • Choosing the right RPA platform
     • Choosing RPA partners
   • Assessing the success of the solution post implementation
3. RPA developers and solution architects who design, test, deploy, and maintain bots according to business needs.

What are the best practices to building an RPA CoE?

To get the most of your RPA CoE, follow these best practices:

1. Develop an organization-wide RPA strategy:

Your RPA CoE should develop an RPA strategy that is operable across the entire organization. This strategy should include:

• Goal of implementing RPA and expected results
• Budget of RPA project (e.g. infrastructure, bot licensing costs, employee training)
• Steps until solution roll-out

2. Develop a governance strategy

This step requires collaboration with IT and audit teams in the organization to develop policies that govern the RPA strategy in a way that aligns with business policies.

These policies cover different areas such as user authorization, source code control, data retention and privacy regulations, and collaboration methods.

3. Develop a disaster recovery strategy

Developing a disaster recovery strategy in an RPA CoE is a critical step because the entire organization relies on a single unit to deploy the RPA solution. Therefore, it is important to:

• Define roles and responsibilities across the CoE to mitigate disasters.
• Identify risks and ways to manage them in case of occurrence.
• Create data backup plans and storage areas both on-premise and on the cloud.
• Run regular drills to test the disaster recovery plan.

Recommendations

Rely on RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) providers and RPA-focused MSPs if you do not have the time to re-skill your team and build your own center of excellence. MSPs enable businesses to leverage RPA capabilities without needing the infrastructure or skills, and typically have lower costs but only in a short term.

For more on RPA

To understand why RPA is important and get a grasp of the market size and adoption, read our comprehensive articles:

• RPA Market Size and Popular Vendors
• Top 5 Use Cases of RPA in Operational Excellence
• 5 Reasons Why BPO Companies Should Leverage RPA

To explore RPA benefits, challenges, and how it can transform your business, download our in-depth RPA whitepaper:

And if you are looking for an off-the-shelf RPA solution to leverage in your business, check our data-driven list of RPA vendors, and explore different automation solutions in our comprehensive hub.

And reach out to us to help you choose the right solution for your business:

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