Building an RPA Center of Excellence (COE) roadmap:
Assessment Phase:
 Conduct process mining analysis to deeply understand workflows and identify
automation potential based on activities like repetition, speed, accuracy.
 Benchmark processes against competitors/standards to recognize inefficiencies.
Calculate potential savings from automating manual work.
 Align automation opportunities to overarching business objectives and strategy. This
ensures buy-in and priorities processes delivering most value.
Governance Phase:
 Clearly define team roles like automated solution architects, process auditors, QC
analysts. Outline responsibilities and required skills.
 Steering committee should have executive sponsorship able to allocate resources and
make critical decisions on automation direction.
 Develop guidelines for risk management, security, compliance, and change management
around automation to enable accountability.
Process Identification:
 Leverage workshops, process maps, pain point discussions with business units to
pinpoint top automation ideas.
 Estimate automation complexity, implementation costs, and ROI for each process to
allow objective prioritization.
 Consider both volume of repetitive tasks and overall impact on customer/employee
experience when prioritizing.
Development:
 Training should cover RPA tool capabilities, best practices, and hands-on labs to equip
teams to build reliable automation scripts.
 Testing environment with real-world data enables simulating scenarios and refining
scripts prior to production deployment.
Assessment Phase:
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Use process mining tools to analyze system logs and uncover processes with high
volume repetitive tasks. Interview employees to qualify findings.
Calculate potential cost savings from automating repetitive clerical work. Estimate
reduced error rates and improved compliance.
Benchmark processes against industry standards and best practices to identify
performance gaps that automation can help bridge.
Governance Phase:
 Create a charter clearly defining the RPA COE’s mandate, stakeholders, roles, decision
framework, and success metrics.
 Establish policies for risk management including controls testing, cybersecurity review,
and business continuity planning around automation.
 Institute auditing procedures to regularly review automated processes for accuracy,
unintended impacts, and policy compliance.
Process Identification:
 Maintain a pipeline of automation ideas gathered through ongoing stakeholder
discussions and feedback channels.
 Evaluate each process against defined selection criteria considering ROI, feasibility,
disruption, benefits.
 Segment processes into waves based on interdependencies, data availability, and
complexity for incremental rollout.
Development:
 Provide extensive hands-on practice for developers to gain proficiency in the RPA tool
and build resilient, human-error proof automation scripts.
 Appoint solution architects to oversee script design and ensure consistency with
enterprise architecture standards.
 Establish staging environments to allow incremental testing of scripts across a
progression of environments mirroring production.
Implementation Phase:
 Start with a pilot on a well-understood process to demonstrate value before full
production rollout. Gradually scale up automation.
 Monitor system processing speed, resource consumption, error logs to gauge impact of
automated processes before widespread deployment.
 Establish checkpoints and milestones throughout implementation rollout to enable
pausing and troubleshooting issues.
 Assign process owners accountable for their automation workflows to maintain
continuity from build through deployment.
Training Phase:
 Develop user guides, e-learning videos, live demos, and chatbots to educate employees
on interacting with automation under different scenarios.
 Encourage adoption by highlighting benefits like time savings, error reduction, and the
ability to focus on higher value work.
 Provide a support team as a helpdesk for queries on automation results, exceptions,
process changes. Tracktickets to identify improvement areas.
Improvement Phase:
 Define key metrics around automation effectiveness, efficiency gains, user satisfaction.
Establish dashboards to monitor in real-time.
 Analyze metrics trends to pinpoint automation opportunities - higher volume processes,
more exceptions, weaker adoption by certain groups.
 Institutionalize mechanisms to continually gather user feedback through surveys,
interviews, and by monitoring support tickets.
 Maintain regular release cadence to refine automation based on collected data, metrics,
and user input.
Integral roles Business Analysts play in enabling an effective RPA Center of Excellence:
Analyzing Processes:
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BAs collaborate with departments to map current workflows and identify pain points.
This highlights automation potential.
They quantify process complexity, required integrations, exception handling needs to
assess automation complexity.
BAs estimate ROI potential from automating each process based on costs, time savings,
error reduction.
Designing Workflows:
 BAs document detailed requirements for logic, inputs, outputs, rules, and exceptions to
guide automation developers.
 They work closely with developers to design optimal automated flows aligning to
process objectives and technical environment.
 BAs ensure designs incorporate compliance, security, controls, and auditing
requirements.
Validating Automation:
 BAs develop test cases based on process requirements and expected outcomes to
thoroughly validate automated scripts.
 They analyze testing results at each stage to pinpoint discrepancies from expected
behavior and requirements.
 Issues are documented and tracked to resolution to ensure automation aligns to
specifications before deployment.
Training and Feedback:
 BAs create user manuals, e-learning, and demos tailored to employee groups on
interacting with automation.
 They elicit ongoing feedback through surveys, interviews, and monitoring support
queries to identity enhancements.
 Feedback is consolidated and prioritized for the development team to refine automation.