Why BOT's Fail???

Thomas A Edison said very rightly that “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

You must be wondering Why do so many organizations fail to succeed with RPA? Given the enormous promise of intelligent automation, and its inevitability, why does so many RPA projects fail?

Business Leaders are increasingly turning RPA to deliver value to Clients / stakeholders and meet the new organizational imperative to do right. But you will be surprised to know that 30 to 50 percent of early enterprise RPA projects fail. The market for the technology is projected to grow around 31% by 2025, and it’s easy to see why. But nearly half of initiatives fall short of delivering benefits because executives haven’t laid the right groundwork. Most of them design BOT's in the vacuum of business process without actually addressing the complexities of the technology, so majority of them end up with BOT's that do little to solve the planned challenges.

To make sense of why RPA projects fail we need to classify the types of failures that occur. 

  • Financial Failure: Failure to deliver business value or meet expectations.
  • Governance Failures: Failures due to errors in management and oversight.
  • Operational Failures: Failures due to operational errors or missed operational expectations. 
  • Design Failures: Failures due to poor design practices or principles.
  • Technical Failures: Failures of the software to perform as expected or needed. 

Financial Failure: The vast majority of RPA “failures” are financial failures, or failure to deliver the expected value.  This is nearly always due to a lack of expected cost savings, as few RPA implementations focus on revenue generation. Note that in these implementations the BOT’s themselves might work perfectly and often do, but their results did not meet expectations of value and financial returns. This type of “failure” accounts for approximately 60% of failed implementations and is by far the most frequent and frustrating. Given that the attraction of RPA is that it reduces costs, financial failures are particularly annoying both to the companies attempting to use the technology and the companies that are selling it.

Governance Failure: Governance failures are the second most common causes of RPA failures, representing around 15% of all failed projects. Governance failures as those caused by not using BOT’s correctly or effectively. BOT’s are a workforce, and like any workforce they must be managed and governed to maximize their effectiveness.  Most organizations devote significant time, money and energy building out a Center of Excellence (CoE) for their RPA efforts.

Operational Failure: Operational failures occur when the BOT’s do not perform as expected after they are placed into production. This is distinct from governance failures, which occur when BOT’s aren’t correctly or effectively coordinated.  Operational failures deal with how individual BOT’s operate, rather than their coordination with others. Operational failures are to blame perhaps 10% of the time. They include such things as scheduling BOT’s to run at times when the systems they must access are unavailable.  They include BOT’s requiring security access which company policy precludes.  Operational failures result not from poor design or poor functionality, rather they result from poor planning and governance.

Design Failure: Design failures occur when the programming of the BOT was somehow done erroneously.  This can be missed requirements, misinterpreted requirements, poorly executed designs, and errors in solution architecture.  Design accounts for perhaps 10% of failures.

Technical Failure: Technical failures are where the RPA software itself does not perform as expected or intended. Examples of this include incompatibilities with certain tools, settings, or standards, which prevent the underlying tool from fulfilling its intended purpose. This accounts for the remaining 5% of failures.
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