How to reduce the costs of RPA maintenance?

In research evaluating the quality of RPA, many businesses are having difficulty managing bots. Error correction cycles appear, requiring the company to maintain the RPA regularly. That increases costs for businesses, preventing RPA’s expansion business goals. The following article of WinActor will introduce you to ways to reduce RPA maintenance costs.

1. Why need RPA maintenance?

RPA maintenance work is always extremely important because it will help businesses achieve the desired ROI. At the same time, automated processes will be able to scale more easily, bringing great benefits to businesses. Currently, there are 3 reasons why RPA bots need maintenance:

• UI changes
• Changing regulations
• Missed requirements

UI changes

UI changes are the process of changing the user interface better to match the trends and needs of the customer. At that time, RPA bots also need to be maintained and the application with which it is interacting and working. Because if we do not support and upgrade in time, RPA will appear with a series of manipulation errors.

Example: During order processing, RPA will take care of automating this process by entering data in a specific field of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). When EPR updates with new features, the input field is changed. Then, if we don’t maintain the bots, they will create bugs and break.

Changing regulations

In the process of working, process improvement is something that businesses must do to improve labor productivity. Then, they will have to change regulations to optimize and innovate processes. This leads to an increase in RPA’s maintenance costs as the bots also need to be changed to accommodate the new process.

When a business wants to change regulations or adopt a new policy, analysts will evaluate how effective this process change is. They will use manual operations without resorting to RPA. The bots are then dropped from production, modified, tested, and then redeployed.

Missed requirements

The cause of missed requests may lie on the business side. Most organizations haven’t figured out the best practices for providing RPA developers yet. At that time, the RPA company will not guide and develop the bot accurately and comprehensively.

In addition, much of today’s RPA development is communicated through cumbersome, complex process design documents (PDDs). This will make it easy for you to miss some requirements during manual documentation. Sometimes the missed requirements are the critical requirements that determine the effectiveness of the automation process. From there, it will be difficult for businesses to achieve the desired ROI.

2. How the right upfront design approach can reduce RPA maintenance and support 

The problem of RPA maintenance and support is mostly reactionary. RPA maintenance work happens when bots generate bugs, and automation teams scramble to minimize downtime. However, diagnostic yield is needed to understand why the errors appear. Then you can fix the RPA bots. This work will take very little time to complete when we know what causes the bot to fail. Therefore, RPA will minimize its downtime, improve business productivity.

Change RPA management strategy from reactive to proactive

The best way to minimize bot maintenance is to switch from reactive RPA management to an aggressive strategy. That is, businesses will design appropriate principles before applying RPA. The automatic process system can avoid many maintenance problems and create a professional working environment with fewer system errors.

Optimize your process by asking your system questions

To optimize the process, it is important to identify the necessary factors before applying to an automated process. With this stage, the more we concretize the elements, the more perfect and optimized our approach will be. You must not only list the dependencies but also detail and concretize them. What is specific here? You can answer that question in a few ways:

• A suitable tool should be applied to each element
• Link dependencies depending on the specific process steps involved.
• With exceptions, find the best way to handle it

That way, if there are any changes, you can completely handle them. You’ll learn how that process change affects a different process or location.

Blueprint tool minimizes maintenance errors and supports RPA

Replacing PDD blueprints with digital blueprints will help businesses reduce errors for RPA bots. The all-inclusive digital blueprint should be communicated to RPA developers. The most basic examples are:

• Detailed Process Flow
• Functional and non-functional requirements
• User request
• Compliance and regulatory requirements

From there, you can generate new ideas that contribute to the development and scaling of RPA. At the same time, businesses also minimize errors and maintain RPA bots.

In addition, the male digital blueprint automatically feeds into your RPA tools and ensures that your RPA development team has all the detailed instructions in place. Replacing PDDs with Blueprint will significantly reduce maintenance costs, and requests will not be missed. From there, the automatic process of the business will be substantially improved, improving working efficiency.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the article will help you understand the reasons that lead to regular maintenance of RPA bots. There are 3 main reasons for this situation: UI changes, Changing regulations, and missed requirements. Using the right combination of tools and providing optimal solutions will help businesses save maintenance costs for RPA. At the same time, it also helps to professionalize the automatic process system and improve labor productivity significantly.

WinActor is an RPA solution of NTT DATA Corporation. This is the number 1 IT company in Japan. Currently, the WinActor software robot has been trusted by more than 6000 businesses around the world. That proves that RPA is doing a good job of being a good assistant for automating workflows. In addition, WinActor is a great robot process automation with built-in scripting capabilities. Therefore, it saves the maximum budget, time and resources for your company.

Read more: How much does RPA cost?