Preparing to implement Robotic Process Automation at your professional services firm

Like most people-intensive businesses, professional services firms have lots of expensive people doing a mix of low-value, repetitive tasks and high-value, judgement-based tasks. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one tool that can help reduce the proportion of low-value work, and let you focus on the stuff only you can do.

It’s rarely the only thing that makes sense, so you’ll usually implement it alongside other approaches.

Implementing RPA involves a few key steps. Here’s the playbook.

You don’t have to go overboard with each of them. Most firms will be better off taking small steps to start with by choosing one or two easily implemented processes that will provide quick ROI while getting you familiar with the approach, rather than spending lots of time and money planning wholesale changes before fully understanding how it all works.

Step 1: Identify your processes

Start by making a list of all your processes. It doesn’t have to be exhaustive, you’re going to cut it down later anyway. An easy way to do this is to ask the people actually doing the work “how do we …”

That includes you, of course! Some examples might be “How do you onboard a new client?” and “How do you request data from them?”

Step 2: Prioritise the list

Give all the processes you identified a score out of ten for:

how frequently it occurs,
how repetitive it is
how “switched-off” you can be when you do it (i.e. if a process requires the expertise or intuition of an experienced person, you can’t do it when switched off, so give it a low score),
how often errors creep in and how damaging those errors are,
how much time you would save by automating it, and
how valuable that time is.

Rank the list from high score to low.

Step 3: Identify any difficulties

Some processes are easy to automate, others are hard. It will depend on things like:

how accessible the required data and systems are - does it have an API? Are there existing integrations for the major RPA solutions or do you have to do something custom? What’s the quality of the data?
whether there’s an existing RPA solution or approach that will do what you need without extensive customisation,
how difficult will it be to change the way people work, and
whether or not there is budget available.

Often you’ll find that you don’t have the required expertise to answer some of those questions internally. This is where a trusted service provider can help. They’ll be able to answer questions about how accessible data in a particular platform is, and what approaches might be the best for your specific combination of systems and processes. Not coincidentally, that’s where we come in! We’ve helped professional services firms from big 4 accountants to boutique strategic advisors modernise their systems and improve their workflows, and the whole point of writing this is to show how we can help you too.

Step 4: Develop a business case

Once you’ve identified some opportunities, figure out what it will cost, and how long it will take, to automate them.

You can get a reasonable idea by getting a quote from a RPA solution provider. It’s probably better to avoid the big RPA software providers at this stage, because you don’t yet have the expertise to know what it will take to implement their software, but an advisor who has done it before, and can help you pick the right software and approach, should be able to give you a good idea of costs and timing.

Try to get costs for one or two of the easiest and most impactful processes to start with. It’s not always possible - if you have a technology platform that is difficult to get data into or out of, for example, much of your cost will come upfront in creating an integration for it - but if you can start with one or two medium/high impact processes with low automation costs, you’ll have a successful implementation under your belt and a much better idea of the business case for subsequent ones.

You might be able to do your first automation for less than $10k. We’ve seen some low-hanging fruit that were quick and easy to implement, and saved a dozen staff half an hour a day, cutting over $150k in costs out of the annual budget. We’ve also seen some attempts that spent months in planning, purchased expensive software, then paid to customise it, only to create a different process that didn’t really save any time, and was forgotten by the next budget cycle.

As always, our philosophy is to have experienced people do small amounts of planning, followed by small amounts of implementation, then repeat the cycle using what we’ve learned to improve the next iteration.

Step 5: Get buy-in

The change involved in updating your company processes can be difficult for staff. If you don’t get buy-in from senior management, whether in your division or the company as a whole, you might find yourself with some great new timesaving tools that no one uses. Creating an environment where people want to adopt the new approach can be the difference between freeing up an hour a day and a wasted project.

Conclusion

RPA isn’t as difficult to implement as it sounds. Hopefully this outline has given you a place to start thinking about it, and of course we’d be happy to have a chat about how we can help you modernise your processes and technology.