Have you ever thought about
how many bots you come across daily? Imagine how things would turn out if all
these bots stopped helping you! Will you feel like transporting yourself to
early civilization days?
Hyper-Intelligent
bots are designed to handle all your business workflows end-to-end with a
highly accurate and efficient process. With bots handling the business
workflows we can expect a smooth functioning of the organization with no or
limited incidents. But, if we go back to asking what bots are; simply put, they
are software applications that imitate human activities and eliminate mundane
repetitive tasks. Like all other software applications, these bots also require
maintenance time and again to continue working efficiently, effectively, and in
compliance with the company norms. The maintenance task becomes even more
challenging when the business process undergoes some underlying changes. Hence,
any company wanting to exploit hyper-intelligent automation solutions has to deploy a good number of skilled
resources and define the support responsibilities clearly.
Maintenance driven approach for a hassle-free process
Any
humanly created process cannot be expected to run forever. But, the need of the
hour is for all processes to run smoothly without any error round the clock. To
fulfill the need for trouble-free processes, the top-notch solution is to take
the maintenance driven approach.
Even
if the bot is built with the best programming efforts to handle any maintenance
related issues, there is still a fair chance for the system changes to occur
which requires a good maintenance process for the smooth functioning of bots.
Hence, every company handling bot processes need to clarify maintenance
responsibilities as the first step towards guaranteed smooth bot operation.
Hence, a maintenance driven approach is required to
handle:
- Process changes
- Updating of interface
applications
- Implementing new functions of
the software
- Security patches for one or
more software applications
- Changes in the regulatory or
business environment
The Support and
maintenance team makes sense
Is
having a maintenance solution approach enough to ensure the smooth functioning
of bots? Once the solution is up and running, don’t you think your key
stakeholders would like to monitor bot performance as and when they require it!
Hence, it becomes all the more required to centralize the monitoring of bots by
creating a support and
maintenance team
handling such activities. The maintenance team should focus on monitoring the
software bots for the proactive handling of adverse situations. Such teams
should be enabled with IT providing the necessary infrastructure for effective
coordination in smooth operation.
Different maintenance and control tasks
We
all agree that the support team in any organization is responsible for planning
the smooth operation and monitoring of production bots. They also coordinate
with the IT infrastructure teams to check for the availability of automated
processes.
Along
with this, the team solves all problems related to the execution of bots.
Another important activity that a support team takes charge of is to ensure the
maximum license utilization through effective planning, monitoring, and
execution of process bots.
With
proper controls in place, the tram can thoroughly check if any unauthorized
bots are running in the background in the production environment and ensure the
smooth running of processes that are business-critical and complex require
special skills to deploy the process.
Predictive change management
Change
is inevitable, and hence, a bot must be designed and maintained to update such
changes in the process or system that the Automation is running. This makes the
task of the Support Team even more challenging since they have to make sure:
- Detailed documentation is
ready to manage any improvements.
- Meeting minutes are noted down
precisely for any information about future updates.
- Bot sensitivity to certain
changes is noted down which can be considered as minor in normal IT
applications.
Therefore,
a Support team member should be in constant touch with process owners and users
so that the team is well-equipped to handle any changes made in any of the
bot-running machines. Also, upcoming changes to the application surface need to
be proactively discussed and planned for the smooth functioning of bots.
To
illustrate this further, let us take an example of changes in the login page. A
normal human will understand the login interface even after it gets updated and
can easily figure out where to input the username and password. Whereas, the
same is not true in the case of a Robot. A bot needs to be redesigned to handle
such changes so that the remaining automation flow is not hindered.
Hence,
there should be a constant communication plan for the RPA process where the
Support team will make sure that the application and the process owners are
informed about the type of change that needs to be updated for the bot to
respond further.
Quality problems in maintenance lead to external solutions
If
you are thinking the Support team is solely responsible for making updates or
fixing bugs, then think a bit more! A Support team member with development
skills can showcase his expertise in continuously searching for improvements or
modifications to make the existing automation process running in production
still more efficient. Also, identifying bottlenecks and other problems during
the maintenance process is again a part of the responsibility of support staff.
Also,
the Support team has to ensure quality is maintained in the production
environment of the automation process. When the team fails to adhere to the
agreed protocol or different team members with different skills react to the
same problem differently, the quality of the process is compromised. When such
situations are faced by the team, they have to outsource RPA consultants to
handle such bot failures which will add to the overall cost of the company.
Full control through Bot center (BC)
Are
you finding trouble with traditional support models? These models with service
tickets cannot provide an immediate fix to damage caused by an event of bot
failure. Hence, to overcome this challenge, here is a recommendation to use Bot
Center (BC) to handle your Support models. If you are wondering what other
advantages will you get using Bot Center, here is a list of few other benefits
that BC offers:
- Full control of automation
activities in the production environment.
- Identifies gaps, resolves conflicts
and bridges downtime during the bot’s working cycle.
- Responsible for developing a
framework for all necessary support and maintenance processes.
- Proactive in Incident Management Process:
- Describes how incidents have
to be managed at different levels.
- Handles malfunctions of
intelligent solutions during productive operation.
Hence,
the BC is here to provide an all-in-one solution to all problems faced by the
Support and Maintenance Team with effectively handling disasters and improving
the overall efficiency of the team.
The basis for effective scaling of bots
We all know what Automation CoEs (Centers of Excellence) does! They help companies identify which processes are automatable and strategically develop robotic processes to automate the same. Similarly, a Bot Center (BC) focuses on scaling the digital workforce and develops effective strategies to maintain bots and accomplish governance.
But, for such BCs to be set up, there is a requirement of qualified resources to support and maintain the bots so that a quick fix can be enabled whenever the bot malfunctions, changes, or fails. Such BCs also guarantee a flawless automation solution to be delivered over the entire life cycle adding the desired value for the company.