Build a Center of Excellence Framework

Best practices for strategic, scalable automation

What is a Center of Excellence (COE) Framework?

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An automation center of excellence framework includes the people, processes, and technology necessary to maximize the benefits of automation. It effectively uses robotic process automation technology, but also moves your organization beyond RPA and ensures that you are employing automation best practices. A center of excellence is crucial to finding new automation opportunities, scaling your automation within the organization, and carrying out a long-term vision.

Today’s businesses need to be fast-paced, agile, and efficient, and that means automation is no longer optional. In recent years, robotic process automation (RPA) has become increasingly popular due to its flexibility and ease of use. But deploying RPA software without an underlying strategy leads to disappointing results.

Building Your Automation Center of Excellence Framework

Learn the expertise you need to put together a great team, follow best practices, and continually optimize your automation COE. 

How Do You Develop a Center of Excellence?

Creating an automation center of excellence framework ensures that you are automating your enterprise with strategy and vision.

Put Together the Right Team

Build your team to identify business pain points, document existing processes, gather requirements, research automation solutions, and build the initial workflows.

Identify Automation Priorities and Opportunities

There’s a potentially endless queue of processes in your organization that could be automated. Learn to identify the most important and impactful opportunities.

Ensure a Good Technological Foundation

Follow best practices to ensure that your automation builds upon solid infrastructure.

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Automation Center of Excellence Model

People and Processes

You may be transitioning to a digital workforce, but your human team is still the key to a successful transformation. To build the framework for a successful center of excellence, pair the right people and processes.

The core team

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The ideal core team for your automation project has a range of skill sets. Business analysts document processes and assess the impact of automation. You also need someone to build the automation. Depending on the requirements of the workflow, this person could be a business user or an experienced developer. Finally, get members of the operations team on board to test and monitor the automation.

Systems and Infrastructure for Your CoE Framework

Your center of excellence is only as good as its technological foundation. Making good choices about systems and infrastructure sets the stage for rapid growth and prevents issues down the road.

Infrastructure

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Enterprise-class automation requires enterprise-class architecture. This includes features like high availability and disaster recovery, auditing capabilities, and role-based security. Follow the same DevOps best practices for your automation as you would for your other critical systems to create the strongest COE framework possible.

Our automation center of excellence allowed us to fully realize the benefits of automation. Our COE has enabled an organization-wide innovation strategy while developing the necessary automation knowledge and capabilities. We are changing the way we do business.

VP of Operations a National Healthcare Organization

Automation COE Training and Services

Fortra offers automation audits to assist you with your center of excellence adoption. Take advantage of our resources and expertise to get an in-depth analysis and report on optimizing your automation. Two types of audits are available:

People and Process Fundamentals

Who: Automate customers or those interested in leveraging automation across their enterprise

Goals:

  • Maximize ROI for automation by reducing repetitive tasks, filling process gaps, and maximizing FTE efficiency
  • Identify and prioritize automation candidates
  • Identify center of excellence roadmap

Process:

  • Fortra Business Analyst spends two days onsite
  • You receive an assessment report, completed C&E and ROI, and documentation of existing and recommended process flows
  • Findings and decision meeting held

Infrastructure and Best Practice Foundations

Who: Automate customers interested in optimizing their automation infrastructure

Goals:

  • Maximize ROI for automation
  • Ensure enterprise readiness, including reusability, performance, and scalability
  • Identify center of excellence roadmap

Process:

  • A Fortra Technical Automation Expert Spends two days onsite
  • You receive an assessment report, recommendations, and samples
  • Findings and decision meeting held

Center of Excellence Framework: Success Story

Carter Bank & Trust offers banking and financial services to customers across 100 branches. After spending far too much time on routine, manual processes—from new employee onboarding and payroll to customer account maintenance—they established a Center of Excellence to bring an “automation first” culture to their organization. Automation streamlined these processes and migrated over 300,000 customer accounts to a new system within a 24-hour period.

Their automation quickly scaled beyond its initial use and is now handling server reboots, 3rd-party SLA management, and data validation. Carter Bank & Trust has more than 75 robots running processes across the company, saving them time and money.

 

Talk to one of our automation experts about the Automation Center of Excellence framework and see how RPA can transform your business.

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