Over the past decade, Robotic Process Automation Technology has clearly emerged as one of the key levers to expedite Business transformation journey for many organizations. While most of the critical RPA product players are busy selling over-simplification of the Technology leveraging visual programming approach, it makes sense to evaluate the outcome holistically on usage of common IT principles.

“Any non-IT professional can build the RPA BOT using our platform”. This sounds like common pitch across RPA products but then, Why RPA has got significantly high failure rate? Why it is difficult to sustain the RPA benefits for longer time? Why RPA BOTs continue to be a security threat in over-all IT environment? Industry took these questions very seriously and started working towards creating a common framework to ensure quality BOT outcome.

Irrespective of RPA products, most of these standards and best practices can be clubbed under the following FIVE categories,

• Readability – Ease of understanding the code by having elements like naming convention standards & compliance, zero usage of junk code, componentization and simplified logic.
• Configurability – Ease of managing changes and BOT calibration by having inclusion of configurable parameters like performance parameters, URLs, Files & folder paths, email Ids, credentials, business rule threshold parameters, log messages, email formats, etc. and generic design.
• Reliability – Degree of accuracy with minimal exception rate by having elements like robust exception handling, usage of best possible interaction technique, memory leakage avoidance, and appropriately designed auto-recovery and auto-healing mechanisms.
• Security – Degree of freedom from known and unknown threats by having elements like authorization & authentication, credential management, and business data storage & sharing.
• Performance – Minimal average handling time by having efficient delay management, parallel execution, usage of optimal interaction technique, efficient memory management and efficient business logic configuration.

In summary, to extract maximum benefits out of RPA BOTs and to sustain the same on longer run, it becomes utmost important for Enterprises to establish an ecosystem for continuously monitoring the quality standards during the complete SDLC.