Starting an RPA Center of Excellence with Ted Lano

Krista White: Thanks, Ted, for sitting down with me today. So today at Driven, you spoke about creating an RPA CoE. So first, let's take a step back and can you tell me what an RPA COE is and why I would want to have one?

Ted Lano: Right. A CoE is all about creating a really sustainable practice across your entire organization. There are a lot of opportunities for an RPA, and it could apply to all the different businesses out there. You want to make sure that people have the same sort of expectations, the same sort of standards of delivery, so that you're actually performing a scalable and repeatable practice.

Krista White: I like that. So making RPAs scalable across your entire organization.

Ted Lano: Right.

Krista White: So what's the first step? Like how do I get started in creating a CoE?

Ted Lano: The first step really starts with the pilot phase. So this is where you start building your bots. And as you go through your pilot phase, your main goal is to bring a bot in production. As you get to that end point, you go through all the necessary steps you need to do discovery, implementation, maintenance. That's when you start getting a feel for what it takes to deliver on an RPA program and what it takes to go all the way through from start to finish.

Krista White: So really getting a bot to production is my first step in creating any CoE?

Ted Lano: Absolutely.

Krista White: So when clients come to you and ask about how do I measure the effectiveness of the CoE or the ROI of a CoE or why I should really have one, how do you answer those types of questions?

Ted Lano: Right. The main objective of a CoE is to make sure that you are going after the most valuable opportunities that there are. That are out there. And that's why you need to have a standardized approach for measuring how much every opportunity is worth. So instead of going after just any old RPA implementation, try and make sure that you compare every one of them against one another to determine which one is the next one we should work on, which is going to produce the most value. And where are we going to get the most savings?

Krista White: So is one of the things that a CoE does, help create a roadmap for RPA?

Ted Lano: Absolutely. It helps create templates for everyone so they can measure the same sort of metrics and compare against one another and discover all of the opportunities right away.

Krista White: That's great. Thanks, Ted, for sitting down with me today. You can catch more of Ted here on this YouTube channel when you subscribe. You can also catch a replay at Ted's Driven talk here on this YouTube channel.