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Making a Risk Management Plan for Your Business
It’s impossible to eliminate all business risk. Therefore, it’s essential for having a plan for its management. You’ll be developing one covering compliance, environmental, financial, operational and reputation risk management. These guidelines are for making a risk management plan for your business.
Developing Your Executive Summary
When you start the risk management plan with an executive summary, you’re breaking apart what it will be compromised of into easy to understand chunks. Even though this summary is the project’s high-level overview, the goal is describing the risk management plan’s approach and scope. In doing so, you’re informing all stakeholders regarding what to expect when they’re reviewing these plans so that they can set their expectations appropriately.
Who Are the Stakeholders and What Potential Problems Need Identifying?
During this phase of making the risk management plan, you’re going to need to have a team meeting. Every member of the team must be vocal regarding what they believe could be potential problems or risks. Stakeholders should also be involved in this meeting as well to help you collect ideas regarding what could become a potential risk. All who are participating should look at past projects, what went wrong, what is going wrong in current projects and what everyone hopes to achieve from what they learned from these experiences. During this session, you’ll be creating a sample risk management plan that begins to outline risk management standards and risk management strategies.
Evaluate the Potential Risks Identified
A myriad of internal and external sources can pose as risks including commercial, management and technical, for example. When you’re identifying what these potential risks are and have your list complete, the next step is organizing it according to importance and likelihood. Categorize each risk according to how it could impact your project. For example, does the risk threaten to throw off timelines or budgets? Using a risk breakdown structure is an effective way to help ensure all potential risks are effectively categorized and considered. Use of this risk management plan template keeps everything organized and paints a clear picture of everything you’re identifying.
Assign Ownership and Create Responses
It’s essential to ensure a team member is overseeing each potential risk. That way, they can jump into action should an issue occur. Those who are assigned a risk, as well as the project manager, should work as a team to develop responses before problems arise. That way, if there are issues, the person overseeing the risk can refer to the response that was predetermined.
Have a System for Monitoring
Having effective risk management companies plans includes having a system for monitoring. It’s not wise to develop a security risk management or compliance risk management plan, for example, without having a system for monitoring. What this means is there’s a system for monitoring in place to ensure risk doesn’t occur until the project is finished. In doing so, you’re ensuring no new risks will potentially surface. If one does, like during the IT risk management process, for example, your team will know how to react.
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Writing a Business Plan

While it may be tempting to put off, creating a business plan is an essential part of starting your own business. Plans and proposals should be put in a clear format making it easy for potential investors to understand. Because every company has a different goal and product or service to offer, there are business plan templates readily available to help you get on the right track. Many of these templates can be adapted for any company. In general, a business plan writing guide will recommend that the following sections be incorporated into your plan.
Executive Summary
The executive summary is the first section that business plans open with, but is often the last section to actually be written as it’s the most difficult to write. The executive summary is a summary of the overall plan that highlights the key points and gives the reader an idea of what lies ahead in the document. It should include areas such as the business opportunity, target market, marketing and sales strategy, competition, the summary of the financial plan, staff members and a summary of how the plan will be implemented. This section needs to be extremely clear, concise and engaging as you don’t want the reader to push your hard work aside.
Company Description
The company description follows the executive summary and should cover all the details about the company itself. For example, if you are writing a business plan for an internet café, you would want to include the name of the company, where the café would be located, who the main team members involved are and why, how large the company is, who the target market for the internet cafe is, what type of business structure the café is, such as LLC, sole proprietorship, partnership, or corporation, what the internet café business mission and vision statements are, and what the business’s short-term objectives are.
Services and Products
This is the exciting part of the plan where you get to explain what new and improved services or products you are offering. On top of describing the product or service itself, include in the plan what is currently in the market in this area, what problems there are in this area and how your product is the solution. For example, in a business plan for a food truck, perhaps there are numerous other food trucks in the area, but they are all fast –food style and unhealthy so, you want to introduce fast food that serves only organic and fresh ingredients every day. This is where you can also list your price points and future products or services you anticipate.
Market Analysis
The market analysis section will take time to write and research as a lot of effort and research need to go into it. Here is where you have the opportunity to describe what trends are showing up, what the growth rate in this sector looks like, what the current size of this industry is and who your target audience is. A cleaning business plan, for example, may include how this sector has been growing by 10% every year due to an increase in large businesses being built in the city.
Organization and Management
Marketing and sales are the part of the business plan where you explain how you will attract and retain clients. How are you reaching your target customers and what incentives do you offer that will keep them coming back? For a dry cleaner business plan, perhaps if they refer customers, they will get 10% off their next visit. In addition, you may want to explain what needs to be done in order for the business to be profitable. This is a great way of showing that you are conscious about what clear steps need to be taken to make a business successful.
Financial Projections & Appendix
The financial business plan section can be a tricky one to write as it is based on projections. Usually what is included is the short-term projection, which is a year broken down by month and should include start-up permits, equipment, and licenses that are required. This is followed by a three-year projection broken down by year and many often write a five-year projection, but this does not need to be included in the business plan.
The appendix is the last section and contains all the supporting documents and/or required material. This often includes resumes of those involved in the company, letters of reference, product pictures and credit histories. Keep in mind that your business plan is always in development and should be adjusted regularly as your business grows and changes.
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Make RPA the anchor of your business contingency plan
2020 has been a tough time for businesses of all shapes and sizes, and we’ve all learned to appreciate the value of a stable business contingency plan. For banking and government industries, dealing with changing social distancing and remote working regulations is as much of a challenge as it is in any other. It’s important to be prepared for the unexpected.
Luckily, technology like robotic process automation (RPA) can help provide you with a business contingency plan to stay ahead in a changing world. Let’s take a look at how you can do that.
A business contingency plan with RPA
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a type of process automation in which software robots, “bots”, are programmed to complete repetitive tasks. For those in banking and government, the ability to automate tasks like data, such as data entry, invoice processing and much more is a vital benefit when ensuring business resilience.
By investing in robotic process automation, you can automate many of these time-consuming manual tasks, which has several significant benefits. First and foremost, it frees up valuable time for employees that would otherwise be undertaking this work.
It also makes business processes faster and more streamlined—which is vitally important when you’re trying to ensure business continuity during disruptive times. Vitally, it also means your sales and customer service staff have more time to spend with customers and residents.
Now we’ll take a closer look at the benefits for business continuity when implementing RPA in your business:
- Quick to implement
One major benefit of RPA is that it’s easy for anyone to get started. Unlike more complex process automation technology, RPA solutions can be code-free. That means individual line of business leaders, HR workers, and non-IT specialists can get up and running easily.
As well as this, RPA slots into the workplace processes you already have and works seamlessly with them. That means making RPA a success doesn’t require the upheaval of a widespread rollout of new tools. Nor does it need a complicated adoption strategy. By simply programming software bots to complete individual tasks, you can make your existing processes faster, more agile, and better able to adapt to unpredictable business conditions.
- Easily scalable
RPA also enables you to vastly accelerate your existing processes. RPA software bots complete data entry tasks much quicker than the average worker. That means the processes where they’re deployed will be much more ready to adapt to fast changes, such as a surge in onboarding new employees, clients, or customers.
At a time when many businesses face a future of great uncertainty, it’s vital that your processes and workflows can adapt to sudden changes in demand or resources. This is a vital part of enabling business agility and continuity during difficult times.
- Enables flexibility
Flexibility is crucial for organizations today. And to achieve flexibility, it’s important to ensure that workers have the time and space to think creatively. This isn’t possible when people’s time is wasted on repetitive manual tasks.
But when RPA takes over manual tasks like moving information from one place to another or processing paperwork such as invoices, your employees have more time on their hands. Attention that can be turned towards more strategic work of higher business value. This room for creativity is a vital part of staying adaptive, focused, and agile during difficult times.
RPA in action: Keeping the world moving
Tools like RPA are helping banks and governments build a robust business contingency plan in the face of changing business conditions, an unpredictable economy, and an uncertain future. Let’s look at a couple of processes to see how RPA works in practice:
- Streamlining loan processes
How does an annual saving of $304,000 sound? That’s what we helped achieve for Johnson Bank, on just one process.
“Before Nintex RPA, it took someone a full week to process load data. With Nintex, it now takes only about two hours. That’s an enormous saving of time and money” Rita Kerkman, Johnson Financial Group’s AVP management reporting specialist.
Now imagine other areas where this could apply, and you can start to envisage the additional savings that can apply to your business.
- Managing contracts and invoices
It can be difficult and time-consuming to ensure that important documents are shared with the relevant people, with the appropriate permissions, and saved in the correct place. But compliance demands that these things are done properly. With RPA, bots take care of the manual process of moving, sharing, and filing these documents, reducing the volume of banal tasks.
These are just two examples of how RPA can help workers make tangible time savings. RPA can be applied to processes right across your company – wherever manual tasks are preventing employees from doing their most valuable work, RPA can help.
But RPA doesn’t just help individual organizations to achieve greater business resilience. Throughout 2020, the team at Nintex has been using RPA and other technology to enable first responders in state and local governments in their efforts to tackle the pandemic. Find out more about the work we’ve done right here .
If you want to find out more about investing in robotic process automation to manage business uncertainty, start your free trial of Nintex RPA today .
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RPA+AI are key enablers for today’s imperatives of continuing digitization, enhancing productivity, and accelerating automation.
Leading organizations have embedded resilience into the way they operate with intelligent automation to create agile business infrastructure and empower employees to focus on adapting to change and solving new problems.
The benefits of intelligent automation make quick work of digital transformation

Instant integration.
RPA connects any system—no matter how disparate or legacy—with zero development work.

Ensure data security.
Mitigate risk and control remote access to systems and data with secure RPA acting as go-between.

Automate at scale.
AI-powered RPA empowers business users to automate, for broader and faster digital transformation.

Respond faster.
RPA creates more adaptive business infrastructure to accelerate disaster recovery.

Enable employees to adapt.
A Digital Workforce makes quick, error-free, work of tedious processes, so employees can focus on responding to change.

Cloud enabled continuity.
Intelligent automation that’s cloud-native is resilient to corporate datacenter disruptions and provides distributed access instantly.
Continuity. Efficiency. Transformation. It’s all here.

Download the Now & Next: State of RPA report to see how real RPA strategies and budgets are working—including success tactics from RPA deployments with 375+% ROI—across hundreds of global companies and thousands of Automation Anywhere customers as they pave their paths to business resilience.
Apply RPA+AI for better than business-as-usual operational efficiency
See how intelligent automation helps enterprises face post-pandemic challenges by enabling a new level of business continuity and more rapid digital transformation

Automate to adapt to COVID-19
Address your immediate business challenges with RPA+AI that enables you to automate in a matter of weeks. Mitigate disruption with RPA to keep teams and systems connected and maintain customer support.

RPA for return to work
RPA+AI can alleviate the complexities associated with managing the transition back to work in particular for workforce health management, workforce scaling, and handling new policies and audit requirements.

Ready-made bots for business continuity
With pre-built bots, you can put RPA to work right now to solve for common business continuity management needs. Bots can support every effort from ensuring adequate staffing to managing restocking inventory.
Mitigate business disruption across corporate functions with RPA
- Handle Force Majeure triggers
- Address increasing security, legal, and financial (SEC) requirements
- Support urgent scenario modeling to assess business impact
Customer Care
- Manage increased call volumes
- Handle notifications to customers, partners, and government
- Alleviate request processing workload
- Enable remote Help Desk efficiency
- Deploy new applications for remote access
- Set up security policy updates for remote users
Supply Chain/Operations
- Automate supplier performance management
- Coordinate supply chain program management with supply network
- Secure and adjust logistics and transportation
Nimble. Resilient. Ready for anything. Discover how customers are deploying RPA in the new normal.

With RPA, UBS cut application processing time by 88% to handle COVID-19 response loan volume.

KeyBank responded to COVID-19 work surges with RPA, completing 9 years worth of work in 2 weeks.

NHS creates oxygen supply monitor bot in 12 hours, freeing 1,500 hours of essential resource capacity.
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Rpa – the short and long-term solution to business continuity.

It’s attracting more interest than ever. Source: Shutterstock
- Automation has for a long time been a cross-industry digital transformation goal, but now adoption’s being expedited
- RPA software is offering a solution for business continuity and IT adaptability
- The surge in interest is leading to new use cases and more advanced offerings from vendors
Before being blindsided by the pandemic, backend automation was at least on the radar of most firms in industries, from banking to healthcare. But interest has accelerated. Automation technology, more specifically Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, has seen a spike in interest as businesses seek solutions to keep day-to-day operations running.

Healthcare RPA could boom with COVID-19 ‘tailwinds’
Faced with staff in lockdown, sudden spurts in service loads, changes in supply and demand patterns, businesses have scrambled for solutions that can ultimately drive efficiencies and reduce manpower, both now and in the longer term as an economic recession looms.
While enterprise tech spend has on the whole been stymied by financial and marketplace uncertainty, and subsequently shored-up budgets, RPA companies like Another Monday, PegaSystems and UiPath have reported increased business from existing and new customers.
“The global pandemic has shaken businesses across every industry, driving rapid changes to virtually the entire workforce and upending tech priorities for many CIOs this year,” Vijay Pullur, a digital transformation expert and CEO of corporate incubator Pramati, told TechHQ . “Digital transformation and workforce productivity has always been on the agenda for many businesses, but the path there was expected to take a minimum of three to five years.”
Now, the pressure to deliver these initiatives has increased many-fold as businesses are caught in a “do-or-die situation,” Pullur said
With call centers closed or running at half-capacity, deliveries delayed and services closed, self-service and customer care areas are key areas of RPA implementation, while banks are working with robotic software providers to process the surge of Paycheck Protection Program [PPP] loans for small businesses under the CARES Act , saving time that many small businesses don’t currently have when trying to retain their employees.
Hospitals and urgent-care centers are using the technology , which can work with existing legacy infrastructure, to handle administrative tasks related to scheduling and testing, freeing up hours of admin work so nurses and other medical professionals can spend more time tending to their patients and deliver treatment faster.
In the legal tech field, RPA and artificial intelligence are being used to automate the creation of legal documents for review and approval by legal experts, and in the medical insurance industry, if a customer files a claim, an app can process this as a job, auto-fill the claim using the information from the customer, and submit that data.
Across all these applications, as just a handful of examples, RPA “reduces error rates, processing costs and increases processing speed tenfold, while freeing up time spent on repetitive processes and automatically transcribing information from various sources across multiple systems.”
Halfway through 2020, Pullur continued, we are realizing that the impact of COVID-19 is not short-lived. Returning to business as usual will not be a case of getting staff back into offices or warehouses. Just like how e-commerce transformed retail for good, the pandemic has changed consumer and workforce behavior – there’s no going back to normal.
Within the last three months, ensuring business continuity has meant business leaders have had to connect a workforce that is distributed, working-remotely or deskless. They’ve had to onboard new employees, while keeping existing staff motivated, while enabling mobile access and rapid collaboration.
RPA the ‘integration glue’
The demanding circumstances of the last several months have put the pressure on CIOs to ensure their business IT infrastructure is fluid enough to implement new business processes, able to to modify existing ones and adapt to new workflows and applications. RPA is helping them ensure that IT infrastructure is agile enough to handle those challenges.
Aside from automating what would otherwise be manual tasks and functions, RPA is now also being used as an “integration glue”, connecting partner systems and other disparate systems to deliver new applications in high demand, Pullur told us.
While RPA is predominantly used to automate business processes, Pullur continued there are more cases of using RPA as an integration layer to quickly connect different emerging systems, where typically applications would be integrated using APIs. Creating APIs from scratch requires skilled developer teams, with a deep knowledge of software for which support and documentation may be scarce, and of course, time.
“Many legacy systems and internal applications do not have APIs,” explained Pullur; “RPA provides a quick-fix way of connecting systems to create purpose-built bridges. This takes minutes to achieve and does not require any developer skills and can be changed easily as business process changes occur.”

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Emulating the interactions of a human user with the system’s UI, RPA solutions can interact with systems by sidestepping any need for complex integrations.
The expedited interest in RPA will see the industry continue to evolve, adding further intelligence to relatively simple software that moves information from point A to point B: “In the first generation of RPA the automation was just about eliminating common manual functions. The next generation RPA is all about deploying AI assisted RPA that can adapt and learn as they go,” said Pullur.
Intelligent RPA software companies are emerging as differentiated offerings to existing RPA leaders, offering advanced solutions in applications such as smart scanning, image recognition, intelligent document processing and pattern recognition. Anticipate the demand for this kind of advanced RPA software, computing giant IBM yesterday (July 8) announced the acquisition of WDG Automation , to help “clients accelerate automation to more parts of the organization, not just to routine, but more complex tasks […]”
Singapore-based Glee Trees, for example, uses natural language processing (NLP) and contextual analysis to read both structured and unstructured data across a range of languages.

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Securing business continuity with RPA Maintenance
Read below about securing business continuity with RPA maintenance. Find a full guide to setting up a world-class RPA maintenance here .
Many organizations experience periods where resourcing enough people to perform even the most business-critical tasks becomes a challenge. This may be due to multiple things, such as vacations, the introduction of new IT systems, sick-leaves, key staff members switching jobs, and many other reasons. Also during this exceptional time, when many business processes are greatly disrupted by the corona outbreak, s ecuring business continuity has become an important motivation to implement robotics .
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help in two ways to secure business continuity when staff fluctuations occur:
- improve business flexibility by alleviating pressure on staff and freeing uptime
- maximize the ability to run processes without the need for human intervention.
However, just having automations in place isn’t enough. The digital workers also HAVE TO keep running; if they fail to do so, they will not create value to the business or provide added security.
RPA tends to require significant amounts of runtime maintenance. Those familiar with robots have all seen how they crash, need new scheduling, or situations where the target system fails to launch calling for incident and problem management. The need for maintaining RPA doesn’t take into account vacation plans or other resource gaps: Inconvenient as it is, the same effort needs to be put into the robots as any other time.
A readily available maintenance organization is needed through the year, and under all circumstances, to ensure the digital workers operate smoothly – especially when there are business-critical processes in production.
Some topics need to be considered when deciding how to set up your RPA maintenance:
1. capacity.
The number of processes that one maintenance specialist is able to handle is related to, e.g., the complexity of the automations, quality of the build, and criticality of the process. At early stages, the amount of personnel needed is typically 1 FTE for 5-10 processes. As the processes get more stable and the organization more mature, 1 FTE is likely to maintain a somewhat larger amount of automations.
As personnel always have absences in the form of sickness, training and the very actual vacation season, the maintenance organization’s size should be set up so that the operations don’t suffer, and the automations stay up and running regardless of these fluctuations.
2. Scalability
A well-organized RPA Delivery team with a good pipeline typically delivers 1-3 automations to production per developer each quarter. With a delivery team of 4 developers up to 50 automations are deployed in a year. This rate of growth requires the maintenance organization to be scaled up from 1 to 5 FTE’s at the same time to keep up to the task of maintaining RPA.
3. Competence
Most RPA incidents can be identified and resolved by investigating logs as the incidents are typically related to changes in target applications. Updating the RPA application modeler to get the solution running does not require in-depth knowledge of the target process but demands strong experience in the automation technology in use. In fact, the maintenance specialists should be among the most experienced developers in the organization; this requires training in the chosen technology and extensive experience in developing automations.
4. Maintenance in the delivery team
Maintaining the solutions in the delivery team is a valid way of handling maintenance needs but also has a significant weakness. If developers tend to transform into full-time RPA maintainers when they have deployed 5-10 solutions to production, this hinders the progress of the whole program. Scaling up the solution and hitting targets slows down and the entire thing can come to a stand-still. The situation can be quite costly as the most significant benefits of RPA are linked to volume and using the technology on an industrial scale. Additionally, heavily relying on a small team of developers to also run processes can quickly hinder business when key staff members take time off or switch jobs.
The digital workforce is only creating value when the robots are working as intended. If your organization has an automated process pool of 100 FTE’s and the yearly fully-loaded cost of an FTE is 70 000 €, the impact of all processes being down for 1 day each month is potentially 230137€ (3,29 FTE).
Other downtime costs can also be related to mission-criticality: significant additional costs may result from business impact consequences such as losing a client, sanctions for failing to keep to service terms, delays to production, etc.

Looking at the cost of downtime, it is clear that setting up effective maintenance is required for productive automations. The maintenance function should aim to continuously improve the solutions to add to the automation-level of business processes and minimize downtime. Setting up, running, and growing an in-house maintenance team, however, also has its costs.
As stated in the beginning, 10 processes in production usually require 1 full-time maintenance specialist. The following chart visualizes the growth of running cost for a maintenance organization that is being scaled up to maintain 10, 25, 50, 75, or 100 processes in production. Bear in mind that on top of these numbers, you must consider training, recruitment, 24/7 rotation, sick leaves, vacations, etc.

Costs can also be related to the mission-criticalness of a process; meaning that process A may carry a much greater cost than process B for being down over a weekend. Significant additional costs may result from downtime consequences such as losing a client, sanctions for failing to keep to service terms, putting production behind, etc.
When planning the maintenance of your RPA solutions, I recommend considering the following:
- Do you have business-critical solutions in production?
- Are the business-critical solutions running in the night-time?
- Do you have enough competence in your chosen RPA technology to deliver maintenance 24/7 and under any circumstances?
6. Outsourcing
The purpose of an RPA maintenance outsourcing service like Digital Workforce’s Run Management is to tackle the challenges mentioned above. Our service enables our customers to collect maximum benefits from RPA, focus on executing their digital strategy, and ensures business continuity under any circumstances by securing the 24/7 operation of the solutions in production. We are also continually improving the solutions which add to uptime and optimize processes to shorten their transaction time.
RUN Management also makes the cost of RPA maintenance transparent and helps to mitigate downtime risks related to automated processes. The customer can decide the priority of each process as part of the service, which affects e.g., the SLA. The service follows ISO20000 guidelines, includes quality acceptance, automated monitoring, making standard changes to processes, and managing and updating schedules.
Find a full guide to setting up a world-class RPA maintenance here .
Digital Workforce is a leading service provider specializing in Intelligent Automation (IA) services on an industrial scale. We offer a full suite of services, tools, and insights to support your journey through the intelligent automation life-cycle. Our cloud service is the easiest way to build an industrialized automation solution that grows flexibly with your organization’s needs. Our RPA maintenance service also ensures that you tap into the full benefits of your automations as your robots run smoothly 24/7/365.
We offer services in the world’s leading RPA technologies, Blue Prism , UiPath , and Automation Anywhere, and build AI solutions for our customer’s around the globe.
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Digital workforce services has received an order of approximately € 2.2 million from a major utility company in the united states, digital workforce services plc’s financial statement bulletin 2022, automation future forum stockholm.
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Rethinking business continuity plans, phase one: initializing rpa deployment.

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Chief Customer Officer at Blue Prism
As today's business leaders experience the economic strain caused by COVID-19, organizations everywhere are looking for ways to better ensure business continuity. Most business continuity planning never took into account an occurrence of a pandemic or a near shutdown of all off-shore and on-shore resources and access to critical data. Most BCP covers areas like technology losses, partial losses of facilities or workforces due to weather or governmental unrest for a shorter period than what we are currently living through.
These uncertain times are giving corporations worldwide a moment of pause as they ask themselves: Were we as ready as we should have been? Did our plans account for something lasting this long? Did we respond the best way we could have? Did we take care of our employees, our customers? Could we have done more with an enterprise-level intelligent digital workforce?
Robotic process automation offers the agility businesses are now seeking. Intelligent digital workers powered by RPA enable flexibility, not just in the business-as-usual mode but, more importantly, in a crisis. In order to successfully deploy RPA in a business as "unusual" setting, companies must accelerate the various stages of planning and maturity. These can be broken down into three phases: Initialize, Industrialize and Institutionalize .
This will be the first of three articles on building out an automation practice, in which I address the initialize phase — this should be viewed as a guideline for implementing automation rather than a strict script. The initialize phase is critical for many reasons, as it helps an organization set a foundation to deliver real business value and become robust enough to scale while ensuring a more reliable business environment. This article will introduce the key components of this stage, why it's so important and establish what best practices organizations should have in place before moving into the next phase of maturity.
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The purpose of the initialize phase is to create a set of best practices that will serve as an operating model and begin defining organizational roles and responsibilities. A company must establish environments and procedures for digital workers, which include identifying or designing processes for automation; staffing and training the center of excellence on how to automate and control processes and digital workers; and standardizing an approach for defining the scope and benefits of the automation program as a whole. Once the key elements are in place, you can run digital workers remotely, allowing human workers the flexibility to adapt to working with digital colleagues and to a new working environment given a situation like we have today. By establishing a basic framework that can be replicated from business unit to business unit, early adopters make it possible to integrate automation into the core of the business.
As organizations begin their automation journeys, they must embrace the opportunity to fail and learn from these experiences. Imagination is key. Businesses can combine that with a trusted, enterprise-level digital worker platform that offers the assistance of external automation advisors and consultants to support the organization's automation vision via internal automation champions. These small- and medium-sized enterprises can help showcase the potential of automation and alleviate business pressures by offering a process or two for free, so the champions can sponsor the discovery, design, build, replicate and ramp-up of new processes independently.
For example: Hospital suppliers are having shortages as COVID-19 puts a strain on the industry, and health care providers' purchasing adjustments are increasing. This could cause a significant backlog and the potential need to hire many more agents. Digital workers can efficiently work through high volumes of cancellations, decreasing the response time and allowing hospital administrators to focus on other critical tasks. By beginning with critical automation that is implemented quickly and has an immediate impact on an organization during a crisis, teams are able to demonstrate the value of a digital workforce in an early phase of automation.
One of the biggest challenges organizations face in this first phase is creating an automation-ready business culture. Businesses often see some resistance to digital workers when they are first introduced. Most of this stems from the fear that the new technology is intended to replace human workers, rather than adding value to the jobs that humans are doing. Especially in the current economic environment where job security is top of mind, it is essential to help employees understand the purpose of adding digital workers to existing teams, and that purpose is to maximize the human workforce that a company employs for customer-facing tasks or creative and imaginative work.
Most successful RPA implementations have included efforts to humanize digital workers, which some companies do by giving them names, celebrating their birthdays or showing the number of digital workers alongside the number of people employed in annual reports. For example, when integrating RPA into the company's infrastructure, one of my clients gave its team of digital workers and managers human names like Clark and Valerie. The employees were able to welcome these digital workers as team members. This extra effort helps digital workers more easily assimilate into a company's culture and enables internal automation teams to get better buy-in from business units.
The purpose of the initialize phase is to take an organization's vision, establish its capabilities and develop a framework that will serve as a guide for each business unit that adopts automation into its practice. At a time when business continuity is more important than ever, not only is this an essential first step, this is an opportunity to redefine the company's goals, establish best practices and lay the groundwork to scale automation throughout the organization for future success in a potentially altered, digital world.
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Leveraging Automation to Achieve Business Continuity in the New Normal

Manish Bharti is president for India and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) at UiPath.
The ‘new normal’ is here and businesses need to start transitioning to the new work culture.
This means ensuring business continuity both now and moving forward, amidst uncertainty. How well businesses do that will determine how fast we overcome the challenges staring at us.
Let me break down business continuity to explain what it means in the current situation.
Business continuity can be the immediate requirements of keeping the lights on, ensuring seamless workflows, enabling faster customer responses, addressing a sudden surge in volume or demand, and/or fulfilling unexpected customer requirements. Or, business continuity can be complex and involve meeting long-term requirements around revamping operations for distributed work, reinventing supply chains, and reimagining business models.
Today, many organizations find themselves needing to push the boundaries on many of those fronts. Automation can be a key lever in enabling current (and future) business continuity.
The 2019 novel coronavirus ( COVID-19 ) pandemic could well be the watershed moment accelerating the adoption of automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It has underscored the need for businesses to ramp up their automation plans with a renewed focus and urgency. It will not be surprising to see some enterprise-wide automation initiatives getting underway.
In many ways, the push has been triggered by the growing clout of RPA in the context of risk mitigation and business resiliency plans and not just as a cost optimization tool.
We are already seeing RPA in action, helping businesses respond to the challenges and demands of the new normal.
Take, for instance, the case of Federal Bank, one of India's leading private sector banks. When the COVID-19 lockdown forced the majority of its employees to work from home, automation kept the bank’s key processes running as usual.
The bank has over 120 processes automated on the UiPath Platform, enabling the organization to continue delivering banking services even during the lockdown. One can't imagine what economic chaos would occur if the banking systems were dysfunctional due to the absence of humans physically in those banks (as was the case when employees had to work from home).
Read the complete Federal Bank story .
Let me give you a few other perspectives from different industries.
Additional examples from UiPath customers in India
Gemini Edible Oils is leveraging RPA for contract and sales order management to ensure business continuity. The two processes are critical to the company’s functioning and automation ensured that the contracts were getting processed and the sales orders generated on time even when only 30% of the staff were able to come to the office due to the lockdown.
Digital marketing company Wunderman Thompson MSC is managing its increased communication and real-time reporting loads due to remote working with software robots. The bots send targeted and real-time action steps over emails. Thus, the robots are helping the company’s workforce stay productive and efficient. The real-time insights on productivity trends and capacity help managers monitor their teams remotely.
Let's also look at how RPA is working right on the frontlines of the coronavirus battle in the healthcare industry.
Robots supporting frontline workers
Managing the data of COVID-19 patients is highly critical. Healthcare teams must work with governments to ensure this data is updated in real time for an appropriate response. The UiPath Platform is helping the Indian Health Department process data for quarantined people 10 times faster while increasing accuracy by 100%. This is helping the government make faster decisions for swifter action, which is key to fighting the pandemic.
Another unique example is Sankara Eye Foundation. With RPA, the foundation was able to process the employee salaries in due time, even at the peak of the nationwide lockdown.
We are helping the Indian government and several frontline organizations use automation to replace inefficient processes and speed up the COVID-19 response. UiPath is also assisting organizations around the globe in:
Monitoring emails for high priority COVID-19 cases
Fielding a spike in insurance claims
Enabling procurement to manage the influx of medical supply orders
Prioritizing digital processes for a bank
City Lockdown ePass generation for essential services personnel
Creating a central dashboard to monitor local outbreaks
Contact tracing while maintaining citizen privacy
These examples are not just short-term improvisations in response to immediate challenges. They hold promising implications for strategic changes in the long term .
I cannot emphasize enough the strategic value of automation in helping businesses thrive in the new normal. It comes as no surprise that we’re seeing automation become a boardroom imperative in the post-COVID-19 world.
If you’re new to RPA , your next read should be Overview of RPA for the C-Suite: The Quick Guide to Getting Started .
Ready to scale your automation program across the organization? Watch our on-demand hyperautomation webinar series .
SVP & MD India and South Asia, UiPath
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The Role of RPA in Business Continuity Planning

Interview with conference speaker Michael Puldy

Interview with Zayed Khan, Keynote for Business Continuity Exchange

RPA has come into its own over the last five years and we are seeing mass global Adoption. Every day, companies are leveraging this technology to solve systemic issues within the organization. This session will set the state for a discussion on RPA and Business Continuity. Attendees will learn about the history of RPA, the current market, and how RPA has been an invaluable tool in the time of COVID. Additionally, Zayed will talk about ways to approach the tech and how RPA could help with your future business continuity plans.
About the Speaker
Zayed Khan has spent the last 2 decades helping brands solve critical challenges across many industries including Healthcare, Insurance, Financial Services, Telecom and BPOs. He has worked with enterprise software players and more agile organizations like FIS, Kofax ,NICE, and Automation Anywhere. He would say “what is happening in the market now is the most unique and exciting time we have seen in our lifetimes. The shift to the Digital Economy and the disruption around Experience and Workforce lend themselves for us to help our clients take leadership positions in the market.” Zayed has gained many skills from years in Product Management, Professional Services and Sales as all those opportunities have allowed him to connect with talented and unique individuals. His real-world education is augmented by his education from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in both the Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems & the Master of Business Administration. Zayed calls Atlanta, Georgia home along with his lovely wife and 2 wonderful boys, and his side passion is anything motorized.
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Robotic Process Automation for Business Continuity & Return to Work
RPA for Business Continuity
Keep Operations Running At Full Capacity
In a world where the workplace has been turned upside down, rpa can help you keep your employees connected, working and safe, all while maintaining business operations and compliance..

Discover How RPA Can Help Your Business Thrive
Companies across verticals and around the world have had to rethink how to keep employees working in the face of a global crisis. robotic process automation (rpa) has been a game-changer, helping organizations maintain operations, whether employees are working remotely, onsite or a combination of the two., why rpa for business continuity & return to work, improved employee safety, quicker disaster recovery, increased customer satisfaction.

Monitor Employee Health
RPA makes it easy to survey employees and implement employee health scoring, contact tracing and infection self-disclosure to ensure everyone’s safety.

Increase Productivity
Whether working onsite or remotely, RPA bots can help employees access shared tools and systems, enabling collaboration and the efficient completion of tasks.

Streamline Employee Onboarding
Whether bringing on new employees or bringing employees back to work after a temporary layoff, RPA can automate HR processes to reduce the burden on HR staff.

Manage Staffing Levels
RPA comes with a convenient dashboard that allows you to monitor and shifts in real-time, so you know who is working and when, even when they are working remotely.

Enhance Security
RPA can help control onsite and remote access to data and systems, ensuring only authorized personnel are granted access and that they can access only what they need when they need it.

Maintain Compliance
RPA can monitor regulations related to health and safety, AR & AP and other aspects of your operations so you know when they are updated, allowing you remain compliant at all times.
Partner with Tangentia Keep Your Business Running Smoothly
Tangentia has been a leader in the automation space for decades. Our experienced team of experts have the skills to develop a cutting-edge automation solution that is tailored to the unique needs of your organization.
RPA makes it possible to ensure the transition of working onsite to working remotely is smooth and that operations continue at their optimal level. This enables your business to keep up at a time when every aspect of our world is changing at lightning speed.

What tasks can RPA solve for Business Continuity and Return to Work?
- Connect and manage data across disparate systems
- Pull key information from a variety of data sources
- Effectively communicate with employees and customers
- Coordinate supply chain management with the supply network
- Optimize workflows
- Generate reports
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Ensure your business, thrives in the best and worst of times, connect with tangentia and speak with a team member to discover how rpa can help you maintain business continuity and facilitate return to work no matter what is going on in the world..
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In order to successfully deploy RPA in a business as "unusual" setting, companies must accelerate the various stages of planning and maturity.
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