What is TCA in RPA and the importance of RPA CoE

Evaluating and implementing an RPA project for your organization can be daunting. When you have a good RPA implementation, the time to realize its value could be very short. In fact, the value of RPA can be realized in just months, rather than years.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a term that BAs use to calculate the cost that the company would incur during a project. In case of an RPA project, the cost would not only include the cost of RPA tool, but also the cost of the people involved in developing and delivering the project.

Though TCO is a good calculation for other types of projects in a company, a technology like RPA calls for a different kind of calculations for projects, and to project a cost that the company could incur.

Sidenote: Know more about where RPA came from, its growth and the future.

What is Total Cost of Automation?

Total Cost of Automation (TCA) is the way in which you calculate the cost of implementing an Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution in your company.

Total Cost of Automation involves the crucial phases and components of an RPA implementation like:

1. Cost of RPA software (Includes the cost of the orchestrator, bots, servers and other elements on an RPA solution)
2. Automation Development Cost
3. Technology maintenance cost of the RPA solution
4. Center of Excellence costs for the company

The costs above can be categorized into two:

1. Organizational Automation Cost
2. Technology Acquisition Cost

1. Organizational Automation Cost

Organizational Automation Cost denotes the cost that the company incurs to learn, develop and maintain an RPA implementation to improve business process.

Organizational Automation Cost includes:

1. Automation development cost
2. Automation deployment cost
3. Automation analysis cost
4. Cost to adopt to business change
5. Skill development and training cost
6. IT support cost for RPA solution
7. Documentation, Knowledge management cost

2. Technology Acquisition Cost

Technology Acquisition Cost includes all the costs that the company would include when acquiring an RPA solution to automate their business process for efficiency.

Technology Acquisition Cost includes:

1. Robotic Software Automation (RPA) software license cost (Like licenses for UiPath, Automation Anywhere and others)
2. Hardware and Software infrastructure cost
3. Infrastructure maintenance cost
4. Third-party integration cost
5. External consultant costs
6. Software License Agreement (SLA) cost for RPA
7. Travel and other resource movement cost

Sidenote: Read more about "Three things that matter for an RPA success story"

The need for Center of Excellence for RPA

RPA is not just another technology implementation in a company. It is a business process change that could have an immediate effect on the company's revenue, people or anything that might be automated. To make sure this huge move is being done in a efficient manner, the need for CoE arises.

The RPA Center of Excellence will behave as the owner of the RPA implementation in the company, who will work with core business units that are about to be automated. They will also be responsible for arriving at the processes that needs to be automated first and then to set the milestones for the RPA implementation.

Phases of Robotic Process Automation Project

Once you sign off on a CoE for RPA, the next thing is to deeply understand the Robotic Process Automation Process that needs to be carried out by the company. At Skcript, we follow a five-step process to implement RPA projects for our clients across the globe.

The five-step process for RPA implementation:

Phase 1: Process Identification Phase 2: Process Clean-up Phase 3: Automation Development Phase 4: Automation Deployment Phase 5: Optimization and maintenance

Phase 1: Process Identification

The first phase of a RPA process is to analyze the existing processes that a business is following. This is a three day exercise that we run for companies to deeply understand and analyze the processes, work to see where RPA can help automate the process by cutting down either time or cost.

Tip: Run Robotic Process Automation Workshop in your company.

Phase 2: Process Clean-up

Process clean-up is where our teams work with your business groups to see which processes will have the maximum impact with RPA in place. We identify and remove unwanted processes with low impact situations to make sure the RPA implementations are earning a really good ROI for the business.

Phase 3: Automation Development

Now that we have a good clarity on what processes to automate in the company, the next step is to start with the development of the project. This phase includes:

1. Narrowing down on a good RPA tool for your use-case
2. Gathering legal approvals from third-parties to run bots
3. Map out the development process and lifecycle using agile methodology
4. Start the automation development process with developers
5. Test and deploy in staging environment

Phase 4: Automation Deployment

Once you have your RPA solution working, and you get a sign-off from the business owners via RPA CoE, we will now go ahead and implementing this in production. This is a crucial process since some items could have changed in production or could vary in production when compared to the actual development of the RPA project.

The Automation Deployment phase will include:

1. Test deployments in production
2. Hand-over and training for internal teams to handle the new process
3. Deployment at a suitable timeframe at your company for the automation to start
4. Setting production-ready timers and schedulers

Phase 5: Optimization and maintenance

Going live with a RPA solution is not the end-all of the implementation. Risk of any third-party system failing could also be a threat to our implementation. To make sure your business runs smoother than ever with RPA, we offer Skcript x Support packages that comes with engineers looking after the orchestrator and robots for any anomaly.

Realizing the value of RPA implementation

When done right, RPA could be one of the biggest competitive advantage for your business. The amount of automation you would need, the speed at which the operations can happen now with RPA and the way in which your people would think, with RPA in place could alter your business for good.

At Skcript, we believe in providing value to our customer with speed of execution and quality. Our enterprise automation processes helps banks, malls and manufacturing companies take advantage of RPA in a very business-friendly manner.

Skcript empowers businesses to maximize their ROI through RPA implementation, with either attended or unattended automation or even a hybrid combination of attended and unattended automation.

Have more queries? Write to us at [email protected] for some help.