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The organizational structure, core functions and functional roles of RPA Center of Excellence

What is the organizational structure and core functions of the RPA Center of Excellence established by large enterprises?

/ Wang Jiwei / tr. by Phil Newell

RR Donnelley (RRD, Donnelly) is a 155-year-old American company whose business extends from the traditional printing industry to Internet services such as data management and analysis, business intelligence and digital channel services. After the application of RPA, its overall efficiency has been improved by more than 3 times, and the accuracy of business processing has achieved 100%. At present, RRD has established the RPA Center of Excellence (RPA CoE) to help enterprises design and expand more automated business processes and accelerate the completion of 90 RPA projects.

In order to improve the financial and logistics processes of the global service center, DHL Global Freight launched the RPA pilot project. As a result, the original 30-person team was halved through the logistics RPA platform, and 15 employees were transferred to more valuable jobs. Seeing the potential of RPA, DHL immediately created the RPA Center of Excellence, built an internal framework, and integrated tools, templates and RPA implementation experience to enable RPA to be rapidly popularized and promoted throughout the company.

Shortly after implementing the RPA program, Adobe quickly established the RPA Center of Excellence. Its CIO believes that the Center of Excellence can not only keep the organization's RPA growth stable, but also enable the tangible quantification of all kinds of data related to business processes. Without the Center of Excellence, there can be no rapid implementation of the Adobe RPA program, and the Center of Excellence must be maintained as part of the RPA program.

The above cases prove the importance of RPA Center of Excellence for the implementation of RPA. There is a view that enterprises deploy RPA quickly and smoothly and lay a good foundation for subsequent deployment, the key factor is to establish a sound center of excellence for RPA. Some enterprises believe that RPA Center of Excellence is not only the key to the deployment of process automation, but also the general command post for the implementation of RPA robots. No matter how to express it, there is no doubt that the RPA Center of Excellence has been the key for enterprises and other organizations to deploy and promote RPA applications.

Through the previous article, I believe you already know what the RPA Center of Excellence is. In this article, Wang Jiwei Channel further analyzes the three organizational structures, five core functions and ten functional roles of the RPA Center of Excellence.

Three organizational structure models of RPA Center of Excellence

From the perspective of enterprise organizational structure, according to the current situation of the company's industry, management system and business characteristics, robot centers of excellence will form different structures and distribution patterns. At present, most enterprises are using the following three organizational structure models:

The first is as a decentralized center of excellence for supporting functions. The RPA Center of Excellence with decentralized structure is distributed in different business departments of the organization, giving employees the ability to achieve business goals through RPA, but also through employees to complete business innovation. This structure has fewer constraints on the local business team within the organization and can help the team acquire business capabilities and expertise.

The management of this structure is relatively loose, and different business units have their own structures and guidelines for centers of excellence, so that the key functions of different RPA centers of excellence will be different. Decentralized structure is a good way to start the RPA project quickly and at a lower cost, but due to the lack of centralized control, it is difficult to expand and contact with IT organizations.

The second is a centralized center of excellence as a central RPA provider. In the centralized RPA Center of Excellence, the RPA functions and resources required by all business departments in the organization will be managed uniformly, so that RPA resources can be coordinated and allocated as a whole to avoid waste of resources and staff redundancy. Because the centralized structure management is based on the step-by-step scheduling of the overall strategy, it can promote the maximum promotion of RPA in the organization.

The Center of Excellence provides the collective resources and expertise needed to successfully implement RPA, and responsible personnel can centrally view all programs, strengthening governance capabilities for projects and priorities. At the same time, the centralized Center of Excellence also sets up an end-to-end view of process changes so that business process optimization opportunities can be identified more quickly, efficiently, and advantageously.

In addition, central management can provide standardized processes and regulations for the evaluation, delivery, monitoring and maintenance of RPA projects, making it easier for RPA to expand its functions within the organization. Of course, the disadvantage is that RPA can not be used quickly, the investment will be greater, and the flexibility will be poor.

Third, mixed structure RPA Center of Excellence. At present, not many organizations adopt a single RPA Center of Excellence, and more organizations are using a mixture of decentralized and centralized organizations. A complete and mature RPA Center of Excellence should be able to handle the needs of decentralized business units and should also have a centralized operation model.

The two-pronged approach not only ensures the delivery and operational support of the Center of Excellence, but also enables each business unit to develop, prioritize, and evaluate automated processes.

Among the above three model structures, the hybrid model can best adapt to the mature plans of centralized and decentralized model functions, and has the scalability characteristics of centralized model, so it can adapt to business growth without restriction.

Deloitte also divides the RPA Center of Excellence delivery model into three types: decentralized, centralized and hybrid, corresponding to the above three structural models.

Due to the different management requirements and departmental capacity levels of enterprises, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and enterprises need to choose according to their own characteristics. According to the five core functions of RPA Center of Excellence, combined with different needs and development strategies of enterprises to evaluate, choose their own model structure, and then start to prepare for the construction of RPA CoE.

Five Core functions of RPA Center of Excellence

A complete RPA CoE should have at least five core functions.

1. Define the CoE organization

RPA CoE first defines the organizational structure, defines responsibilities for internal and external roles that support all aspects of the RPA initiative, and acquires and trains new resources, as well as seamless change management. A strong organizational core ensures that RPA is integrated throughout the company.

2. Manage RPA policies

Establish clear RPA standards, procedures and policies and regulatory bodies, upgrade paths and responsibilities, ensure that businesses meet compliance regulations, information security requirements and regulatory standards, and determine the priority of tasks for different teams and employee access level authorization.

3. Ensure the application of technology

A qualified RPA CoE can always choose the right automation tools to perform the appropriate tasks, and can maintain and support these tools in a timely manner. The technical elements are the architects of the robot operating environment that can facilitate the integration of RPA into any key area, such as IT service management and configuration management databases.

4. Deploy the business process

This is where the RPA application is located to execute, monitor, and change the entire lifecycle of the entire organization. It is responsible for evaluating automation opportunities, then evaluating, developing, testing, deploying the RPA of a stable and scalable architecture to the appropriate business environment, and serving as change process and event management responsibilities.

5. Supervision and operation mode (people and culture)

With the successful implementation of RPA, structural changes will take place within the organization. RPA CoE can analyze the impact of RPA on human roles, change job descriptions in real time, and manage changes in overall operations. At the same time, it monitors the RPA at all times and provides service support when it is necessary to change the organization.

Wang Jiwei Channel believes that these five elements, whether simply supervised by CoE or strictly managed by it, help to define and maintain the organization's RPA operation model. The operation model is a circulatory system used to manage RPA throughout the enterprise, with a focus on developing and supporting high-quality robots that can achieve its promised benefits.

The role and function composition of RPA Center of Excellence

If you compare the RPA Center of Excellence to a stage, there are four key roles, namely, specialists from business processes, HR, IT, and business units. They perform their own duties and provide overall governance, communication, collaboration and empowerment support for the deployment and management of RPA automation by breaking down internal barriers.

At the RPA Centre of Excellence, several department specialists focus on the following:

Business process experts in business process improvement departments will help functional departments and business departments identify, analyze and prioritize tasks and processes that require RPA automation, while HR department specialists focus on dispelling employees' fear of RPA, improving staff skills, evaluating turnover and recruitment plans The function of the IT department specialist is to ensure the smooth operation of RPA at the technical level, and its focus is infrastructure and operation, RPA security, software robot support and maintenance, as well as the consistency and scalability of RPA. The business division specialist knows the characteristics of the relevant processes and tasks involved in RPA best and has the most say in the implementation of RPA business use cases. Actively look for automation opportunities, guide and promote tools and process changes, establish change management methods, and monitor the progress of RPA implementation.

Specific to the job functions of the RPA Center of Excellence, some RPA manufacturers and research institutions believe that a fully functional RPA Center of Excellence should contain at least ten jobs. These posts are as follows:

RPA sponsor, the RPA manufacturer, is responsible for the overall robotics strategy. Center of Excellence Supervisor: senior supervisor, responsible for CoE activities, performance reports and operations supervisors. RPA Project Manager: deliver robot projects according to CoE strategy and ensure ROI according to budget. Director of RPA: promote the whole organization to adopt automation and build bridges in the face of mountains and rivers to ensure the smooth implementation of the strategy. RPA and CoE business analysts: subject matter experts who create process definitions and mappings for automation. At the same time, CoE business analysts are responsible for identifying opportunities and analyzing in detail the potential benefits and resources required. RPA solution architect: oversees the RPA infrastructure and is responsible for CoE detailed design and licensing requirements. CoE developer: responsible for technical design, development, testing and project implementation support of CoE automation workflow. Infrastructure engineer: provides infrastructure support for troubleshooting and server installation, and participates in CoE automation deployment to support the operations team. CoE supervision: responsible for monitoring, scheduling and supporting the implementation of CoE, while ensuring business as usual. Service support specialist: ensure frontline support when any queries or problems arise during the implementation of CoE.

The setting of ten functional positions is suitable for RPA Center of Excellence, and can also be used for Automation Center of Excellence, including BPM, RPA and other tools. It is important to note that it is not necessary to follow this setting to build a center of excellence, it shows the functional roles contained in a fully functional center of excellence.

In addition, different enterprises have different definitions of the functional role of RPA Center of Excellence, which are more or less the same. For example, UiPath sets the RPA Center of Excellence definition role to nine, and some organizations set the Center of Excellence function to seven. In the initial stage of building a center of excellence, some roles may not be needed to meet the normal implementation and operation of RPA, and can be gradually added as needed.

Postscript: RPA Center of Excellence will prevail

In fact, the center of excellence embodies the will of the people and the power of cooperation, because it is a shared center, and what needs to be done is to pool resources such as technology, talent, facilities and other resources to form new capabilities. and then support and help any department that needs these capabilities.

Such an organization with multiple department commissioners can ensure that this capability can be promoted from the top down to each business unit. It can maximize the rational allocation of resources and avoid the waste of resources. Today, many enterprises build automation centers of excellence, computing centers of excellence, artificial intelligence centers of excellence are all this logic.

For RPA, an automation tool that is still unfamiliar to most Chinese enterprises at present, it may be a difficult problem to make the rapid promotion of RPA in enterprises. The uneven information foundation, the isolated island of data between different departments, the conflict of ideas and interests and other factors will hinder the strategic application of RPA.

In this case, only when multiple organizations or departments of the organization participate at the same time, can we ensure that the center of excellence can influence them, make the rules and regulations with the center of excellence as the core into the enterprise operation, and then ensure the overall improvement of RPA efficiency.

Fortunately, Chinese enterprises are quick to accept new things. To borrow the view of Wang Guanchun of Laiyi Technology, compared with foreign companies accepting RPA first and then AI, it is reasonable for Chinese enterprises that have accepted AI several years ago to accept RPA again. The concept of "RPA is integrated into the information system" is also being accepted by enterprises and become the first choice for enterprises in business process automation.

In addition, the COVID-19 epidemic has also given the vast number of small and medium-sized enterprises a new understanding of increasing efficiency and reducing costs. It is believed that RPA with low cost and high efficiency will also become their best choice after the epidemic, and RPA centers of excellence will soon prevail in various organizations.

This is also the main reason why Wang Jiwei Channel put "more enterprises establishing RPA centers of excellence" into the top ten trends of RPA development after 2020.

Wang Jiwei Channel, focusing on TMT and IOT, focusing on digital transformation and business process automation. Content platform search Wang Jiwei]

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