How Long Does it Take to Automate a Business Process?
By: Adastra Bulgaria
Tags: Rpa Tools, Rpa Solutions, Rpa, Process Automation, Rpa Insights

If you consider automating some of your business processes, you took a wise decision! You are already paving the way to a digital transformation! One that should help reduce your operational cost, increase your margin profits and improve customer satisfaction levels. However, you may face some difficulties finding the answers of questions like:

How long does it take to automate a business process?

The usual answer you would get to such a question is “it depends”. There are numerous factors that your process automation depends on. Having a clear understanding of each of them helps you estimate any upcoming request to automate a given business process with ease and confidence. Always keep in mind that your initial idea will evolve over time and new requirements and/or improvements will start popping up. That should not scare you off, but rather encourage you to invest more of your precious time and efforts.

It is virtually impossible to put a price tag on something that is just an idea. For this purpose, people tend to assign different attributes to their respective subjects of interest, that would describe them in the most extensive way, which can be then used as a base for comparison. Considering as many factors as possible to describe your process for automation will allow you to easily identify the amount of time required to bring your idea of eliminating repetitive tasks to life.

Here are the most important factors that should be considered in order to be able to estimate how long it will take you to automate a business process:

Complexity of the business process

· How many applications are involved?

· How many steps does the process consist of?

Partial of end-to-end process automation?

User access management

Test preparations

Read the full article to find out more details.

Conclusion

The bigger the process, the more obstacles you can expect down the road. Luckily, you can learn and avoid them with any successive process that comes next. There are no two processes that are exactly the same which in fact will always keep you alert and prepared.

Small-sized processes

Small-sized processes are usually the ones that are least applicable for parallelism in terms of efforts done for business analysis (BA) and development. The ratio between hours spent on these two topics is also less than the one for medium and large size processes. Therefore, you will probably need between 4 and 6 weeks to deliver an automated solution assuming you know what you are doing.

Medium-sized processes

Medium-sized processes are the most common ones. You will come across one of these 3 times more often than any of the other two types. Such process requires slightly more development hours relative to those spent on BA. You can expect to reach your goal in 8 to 12 weeks depending on the number of steps you have defined.

Large-sized processes

On the upper end of the scale you have the large bots, which usually allow parallelism between BA and development. You can afford to start with implementation without clearing out all the steps required by the process and do it on the fly. This kind of processes will require at least 12 weeks until you reach the expected automation levels. We have seen a mammoth process with over 200 steps that took about half a year to be automated.

Should you have any further questions on this topic, read the full article at our website.