An automation center of excellence (COE) is an internal team that streamlines automation output, provides structure, and helps us scale automation through the enterprise. Having a team of automation experts can help us save time and money in developing our strategy, ensuring that we get the most out of our automation program.
It enables an organization to scale robotic process automation (RPA) at the enterprise level through the establishment of organization-wide RPA standards processes and procedures, sharing best practices, driving common technology adoption, and creating a robust governance model.
Why is having an automation COE beneficial?
An automation center of excellence (COE) is an internal team that streamlines automation output, provides structure, and helps us scale automation through the enterprise. Having a team of automation experts can help us save time and money in developing our strategy, ensuring that we get the most out of our automation program.
It enables an organization to scale robotic process automation (RPA) at the enterprise level through the establishment of organization-wide RPA standards processes and procedures, sharing best practices, driving common technology adoption, and creating a robust governance model.
There are many benefits to having in-house automation expertise, but here are a few we’ve heard from CoE leaders and team members:
• An automation implementation is more likely to provide the best value and return when it is tailored specifically to an organization’s needs, rather than being a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Having a dedicated team of experts is the best way to ensure your organization is using automation in the most effective manner.
• An automation CoE takes input from stakeholders and departments, ranking tasks by their volume and time consumed. They can then identify and prioritize costly tasks that are performed frequently as they offer the largest ROI once automated.
• If the goal is to implement automation across the entire organization, an automation CoE is essential for the successful adoption and evangelism of RPA. By providing a centralized location for knowledge sharing, solutions for common problems, and work aids to help you get started, it establishes trust in the technology and provides the knowledge base necessary to support the use of RPA across the business.
• As automation technology evolves rapidly, the internal automation CoE will stay on top of new trends and capabilities, ensuring that your organization is aware of new features and enhancements as soon as they become available.
When should organizations build an automation CoE?
Both organizations who are just beginning their automation journey and organizations who have already started to reap the benefits of automation can build an automation CoE to scale up their initiatives and maximize the benefits of automation.
People’s United Bank started their first RPA pilot with their loss prevention group, and extended RPA to use bots as part of their mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy. When COVID-19 hit and the United States CARES Act was passed, they decided to utilize more UiPath bots to streamline some of the U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan processes. They automated processes such as loan document printing and helped operations through the unprecedented volume of loans that came from the program. People’s United Bank is now democratizing RPA with business developers across the enterprise. The CoE supports and governs these automation makers and consumers.
How to Build a Center of Excellence
The automation center of excellence framework can be divided into two interrelated pillars: people and processes, and systems and infrastructure. In both parts of the framework, it’s essential to lay a solid foundation for your ongoing enterprise automation project. Getting your people, processes, and technology in order in the beginning ensures that you will make the most of your automation investment and be ready to efficiently implement automated processes in the future.
The Automation COE Team
Automation projects don’t have to be spearheaded by the IT department, but IT should be involved from the start. For a successful automation project, we’ll need a core group with a variety of diverse skills.
The core team identifies business pain points, documents existing processes, gathers requirements, researches automation solutions, and builds the initial workflows. This team should be made up of people who embrace change and champion process improvement. Often these people have already automated some of their own work and want to help others. People skills, organization, and a talent for research are just as important as programming ability for this group.
The Business Analyst
The business analyst has a talent for visualizing process improvements. A great business analyst will not only be able to document processes as they are today, but also redesign them to meet future requirements in enough detail that developer can build the workflows easily. This person should be a respected individual who can lead good discussions with process stakeholders.
The Developer
This job involves taking well-documented processes from the business analyst and converting them into automated tasks and workflows. Depending on the needs of your organization and the capabilities of your automation solution, the developer may not have to be an actual programmer— it can be anyone with the ability to build effective workflows. Some automation teams have multiple levels of developers.
The Operations Specialist
The operations team will be a key part of your automation center of excellence once it gets off the ground, so they should be represented on the core team from the start. These are the people who make sure everything is running on time and without errors. They will be aware of all automation in the enterprise and will be the first ones called if anything goes wrong. Keeping operations in the loop ensures that they will be equipped to solve most automation problems without escalating the issue to development. It will be helpful to the operations team to have good documentation of processes and plans for notifications, escalation, and error handling.