As COVID-19 shifts most of businesses to remote work, robotics process automation has emerged as one of the answers for maintaining business continuity. However, the road to success requires more than the technology itself. As FPT Software’s RPA Director Vu Le said in a webinar last Wednesday, it is critical to “do the right thing” and “do the thing right”.

The right thing, according to Vu, is a management framework that enables businesses to filter certain processes for automation, ensuring an excellent operation, efficiency and transparency throughout the RPA journey.

He particularly stressed the significance of transparency. “All employees in a company should be aware of how RPA is moving and contributing to the transformation of the business”. For instance, how many bots are being developed, how many FTEs are being saved, or how many projects are running – “you will want everything to be transparent within your organization.”

FPT Software’s RPA Director Vu Le shared insights at the webinar on August 19

Vu also referred to capabilities, technologies, and people as other “right things” that every business should consider before implementing RPA.

“Many people think that RPA is the golden key that can solve all our problems, but actually that is not true,” Vu pointed out. Instead, a combination of multiple technologies together will do the trick, for instance, an AI engine to extract data, an OCR engine to read from scanned images, so on and so forth.

FPT Software’s senior RPA executive also addressed the audience about the correlation between humans and bots in an automation process. “You need to retain a certain level of human interaction here. Human is very important for the tasks where you need creativity, where you need human decisions, or where you need to communicate with other people”, he noted. “Keep the communication part for humans and then leave the bots to take care of processing”.

When it comes to “doing the things right” in RPA, Vu said: “a good approach will help you to win the hearts of the employees and the heart of the management”.

“You need to be very well-prepared. Start small, but then you will grow really fast and be able to scale”, he said, emphasizing the importance of building an automation pipeline. “Make sure that when you start the journey, you have enough things to work on for about three to six months”. That period of time, as Vu suggested, should be sufficient to keep the entire business motivated and enthusiastic all along.

FPT Software’s webinar on RPA was conducted on video conferencing platform Webex

Vu was one of the speakers at the webinar “RPA: Accelerate Business Recovery in a Global Crisis”. Hosted by FPT Software, the 60-minute event gathered nearly 200 participants, most of whom are senior managers in ASEAN countries, to share fresh insights, trends and best practices in automation adoption.

Beside Vu Le from FPT Software, the audience had the opportunity to hear from IDC Europe’s Associate Vice President Giorgio Nebuloni as he showed the market updates and forecast of automation adoption post-pandemic. BCG’s Partner Anand Chawra shared his perspectives on RPA’s values and effort distribution in RPA adoption. Success stories from DIP’s Executive Officer AI Miura Hideki and Santen Pharmaceutical’s Head of IS, Asia and China Alvin Siow provided a closer look into how RPA help tackle operational challenges as well as COVID-19 impacts of on-going COVID-19 crisis