Maximizing Your CU’s Robotic Process Automation Investment

The credit union industry has been a pioneer in adapting robotic process automation (RPA) to handle everything from member onboarding and accounts payable to compliance handling and fraud detection. And why not? In theory, automating repetitive, rules-based processes and tasks frees up employees to handle more meaningful work, leading to a decline in human errors, increased productivity, lower operating costs and, most importantly, enhanced service delivery to members.

With a reported 30-50% of all RPA implementations failing, however, the competitive edge promised by automation is failing to materialize. It’s not that the automations don’t work. They just don’t work quite the way they were supposed to, with constant breaks and resultant downtime keeping return on investment low and frustrations high. This is particularly troubling given the next wave of technology already looming on the horizon.

To turn this situation around and enable RPA initiatives to live up to their potential, credit unions need to reexamine what processes they initially chose to automate and why. Nearly a third of all unsuccessful automation projects can be traced back to poor process selection long before the first bots were ever designed. Identifying and addressing process inefficiencies, gaps and waste at the design phase will significantly improve the chances for delivering resilient, high-quality automations that won’t be subject to constant break-fix cycles.

Similarly, automation errors leading to regular breaks can be greatly reduced by meticulously mapping all automated processes to their dependencies (legacy systems, applications with which there is interaction, etc.) before deployment ever occurs. Doing so will enable credit unions to shift from an approach in which they are reacting to regular automation breaks to a more proactive change management strategy that minimizes RPA downtime.

Finally, it is essential for credit unions to share ownership of this initiative across the entire enterprise. A siloed approach in which each business unit within the organization designs and implements its own automations inevitably will lead to increased breaks and downtime, higher maintenance costs and, ultimately, a lower return on investment.

Addressing these issues up front will go a long way toward maximizing ROI. It will also enable credit unions to adopt a more future-focused strategy that better prepares them to use the technologies that ultimately will shape the future of RPA.

Prominent among these technologies is hyperautomation, frequently labeled the future of RPA. Global research and advisory company Gartner states flatly, “Hyperautomation has rapidly shifted from an option to a condition of survival.” Why? Quite simply, hyperautomation allows organizations to automate more complex and complete business processes, not just parts of them, to apply automation at speed. Speed, however, is not the only benefit. Gartner predicts that by 2024 organizations will be able to lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned and optimized operational processes.

Hyperautomation will also lead to protocols being established for every step of automation, including process discovery, optimization, design, planning, development, deployment and monitoring. Properly implemented hyperautomation will enable organizations to automate all of the processes that are compartmentalized by traditional RPA into single, more complete automated processes, boosting efficiency and productivity on a larger scale than ever before.

While hyperautomation may be the next big thing, it will likely be closely followed by artificial intelligence (AI) – the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. Gartner predicts that by 2025, AI will be the top category driving infrastructure decisions, with half of all organizations having devised AI orchestration platforms (compared to less than 10% today).

Given that rosy future, embracing AI solutions would seem to be the next logical step in credit unions’ automation journey. AI complements RPA and together they form a more robust, comprehensive platform for automation: Intelligent automation. Blending RPA’s rules-based automation capabilities with AI’s cognitive capacity and the learning power of machine learning, intelligent automation will enable end-to-end automation of complete business processes rather than only a small part of them. That translates into more relief on administrative burdens, a significant reduction in costs, gains in efficiency and a greater ability to deliver better member experiences.

Finally, low-code/no-code platforms are seeing some of the greatest gains in the hyperautomation space because of their ability to enable rapid software development, allowing business users to be more involved in the development of custom software. This, in turn, will accelerate time-to-value and decrease credit unions’ reliance on their IT departments.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, “70% of new custom applications written by enterprises will use low-code/no-code platforms.” That agility will be particularly beneficial should credit unions encounter uncertain times, such as those brought on by the pandemic, where they need to respond quickly to rapidly changing market demands.

With technology advances like these already on the horizon, now is the time for credit unions to get their current RPA deployments in order by addressing those issues that are keeping their automations from performing at optimal levels and generating the ROI that was originally anticipated.

Dan Shimmerman is President/CEO for Blueprint Software Systems, a provider of digital process design and management solutions based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.