Making the most of your investment
It is already clear that automation is the direction of travel. So you need to learn to work with RPA technology or risk losing relevance.
Businesses need to increase efficiency, reduce error rates and deliver operational excellence. And RPA is the next step on a journey towards enabling intelligent automation through cognitive computing.
If IT people implement RPA, their priority will be to deliver solutions that enable cost savings. So the business case will almost invariably promise savings–but it will fall to others to use the technology and actually deliver those savings. Remember, as is often the case with change projects, the technology is the easy part. The hard thing is bringing engaged people with you on the change journey.
An RPA project in the finance function is more likely to be successful if the people who understand the processes being automated are engaged and enabled to achieve the savings. And they will benefit too. They will enhance their career prospects as they develop important new change-management skills. They might even become champions of the new technology who help roll it out across the business. Exercise the management accounting mindset. Learning to support agile working is easy for management accountants. That’s because they already inform and facilitate the management and control cycle–a learning cycle that’s consistent with the rational, measured and commercial management accounting mindset:
Finally, outcomes are reported, ensuring accountability and facilitating action that improves performance.
Learning to support agile working is easy for management accountants.
In practice, managers are often allowed to rack up expense and opportunity costs for too long on favoured but uneconomic initiatives. Management accounting prevents this from happening, asking the right questions and explaining commercial realities.
In a highly automated environment, much of the transactional and reporting work of the accountant may become redundant. But the management and control cycle will always be an essential discipline–someone must always be in control, asking questions and continuously looking for ways to improve performance.
We recommend that organisations use Agile principles when investigating RPA as a means of improving performance. These allow resources to be focused on the most promising initiatives, meaning viable products or services can be developed quickly and rolled out to market at scale with confidence.
Agile is all about developing a culture where the management and control cycle speeds up and management accounting reigns.
It involves starting in a low-cost, experimental and iterative way that enables:
decisions to be taken and priorities determined swiftly by people who are empowered to be innovative (in a ‘scrum’)
Progress is reviewed objectively. No blame or shame attaches to individuals whose projects don’t meet expectations–such projects are dropped quickly, so valuable lessons are learned at a low cost. Only projects that meet expectations in successive rapid rounds of development and testing are developed to full functionality.
