Process Assessment Tools

Hi,
I have a question regarding the process assessment for RPA. There are two excel templates from the academy trainings. “Process Assessment Tool” and “General Process Assessment” excel templates provided by the. Which one is better to go with the assessment phase?

And second question, what are the critical things to consider for RPA? For example if we can not access to databases in our company we can not automate that process etc. Are there any other critical things to consider?

Thanks,
Regards.

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Hi @ugursayginer,

Excellent questions. The Business Analyst role is quite important when you think about the impact it has on a successful RPA journey.

I would recommend you use the Process Assessment Tool as a starting point. It is good, but not good enough when you want to build a CoE and want to assess processes against each other.

We evaluated Automation Hub, but found out that we need to be lean and use the excel expertise we have to make modifications to the Process Assessment Tool (excel).

We started with the UiPath Process Assessment Tool and modified our requirements

  1. One assessment Sheet for every RPA candidate
  2. Editing / translating the ScoreCard sheet as per our needs
  3. A macro which gets values from all the individual assessment sheet values to the “Multi Process Assessment” sheet
  4. A Pugh-Matrix with our objectively defined criteria. For example, if Automation Potential is high but Estimated time saved is low etc . Pugh-Matrix also gives the ranking of the processes which we use to order the projects to be developed. No process gets special treatment, the one which is objectively a good RPA candidate gets a better rating / rank. (How to make one: pugh-matrix-v1.1.pdf (burgehugheswalsh.co.uk))
  5. Status of each project - have we started development / testing / production
  6. Modify the Assumptions Efforts sheet to our use-case

But why invest so much time in this excel file?

Traceability: If RPA needs to scale, then we need more developers. But that will only happen if we can show the value of RPA to the decision makers.

Quantification: In the individual assessment sheet you will see there is a question to process owners regarding the time it takes to perform one case manually. We use this case handling time not only to calculate the future savings, but also when we have the robot running in production, we can calculate the overall savings due to automation. This way we avoid assumptions or biases in time savings calculations.

Historic Information All candidates which have been reviewed are allocated a sheet with all the information required. If there are some changes in the manual process we can revisit them in the future without having to waste time in preparing for the evaluation.

Looking back, we would not have started our CoE in any other way. Our internal customers support our approach and are happy to see each of their processes being objectively evaluated. They also can see where their process stands when compared to other process in the company in terms of value generated via automation. In the end, the best RPA candidate alone gets to the production phase.


With respect to challenges
Any technical challenges you face will usually not be as critical as the process challenges in RPA.

  1. The biggest challenge is process requirements. You will come across many process which looked quite simple during the assessment stage, but while developing the solution you and the process owner themselves realize that the manual process is much more complicated than mentioned.

    The only way to tackle this is to invest in good developers / solution architects, who think in agile perspectives and are willing to own the design / development / testing / production stages. For example, if the process changes slightly, the automation need not change so much if the workflows are broken into smaller chunks.

    If the process is too complicated, just drop it and move to the next candidate. No point automating a process which might result in large numbers of exceptions.

  2. Think traceability via dashboards. RPA robot logs can be used to make good dashboards which demonstrates value to upper management. If they see the value, more processes will be requested for automation and this will continue. Dashboards are great for this. I have a post describing why you need a custom RPA dashboard (not just the one in UiPath orchestrator) : Logs - ElasticSearch - Help / Insights - UiPath Community Forum

Of Course there are many other challenges, but with the right team they can be opportunities for learning and growing :slight_smile:

I hope this helps you and others!

3 Likes

Hi, could you please point me to the training you are mentioning that has two excel templates?
Thank you in advance!

That’s the process assesment tool which is provided by UiPath in the Automation Cloud. Helps you assess the RPA implementation efficiency and productivity, or at least have a start with template ans few common points.

More details here:

Hi @jeevith,

I can barely understand the Process Assessment Tool when it comes to computations with fixed values, for example, I just noticed that there’s a value that is being multiplied to 260. at first, I didn’t know that this value is actually the number of working days. I would appreciate it if you share any documentation or reference from some of the values used in this tool as it is not explained in the Lesson 4 part of the RPA BA Course where it is attached.

Hope you could help me with this.

Thank you,
Ken

Hi @Kenneth_Balana,

I remember studying the formulas and it did take me some time to understand / modify them. There are some nasty nested if conditions in that sheet!

Do you have anything in specific which you are finding difficult to understand? Since it is a multi-sheet file formulas span across sheets so I totally understand your position. 260 days is usually called as an FTE (Full Time Employee) working in a year, this is the result of subtracting weekend days (365or366 days - 104 days ).

Other than the scorecard sheet the breakdown of team resources (Assumption Effort) contains a lot of assumptions! Since we do not have so many different roles, we decreased them to match our usecase.

This is the approach I would suggest to you

  1. Browse through the Scorecard and Assumption Effort sheets. They contain little to no formulas
  2. Study each formula in Assessment Sheet for example =FINN.RAD($E15;Scorecard!$D$16:$E$19;2;0) is simply given the input at E15 a look-up at the ScoreCard sheet performed on the Type of Input table.

The lookup here would result in Feasible
3. Try going through each of the formula in this sheet
4. Finally, move to the last sheet Multiple Process Assessment. This used either manually where each line provides the result of one assessment. Later you can write a macro to automate this. That way each time you creat a new candidate assessment sheet, you have a new line with the required formulas in this sheet.

Hope this helps you.

1 Like

Hi @jeevith,

Hope you had a great weekend!

Here are my questions with regards to the process tool assessment. The conditions are truly confusing but I managed to learn it for a day or two. I really need your help in this one where there are computations with a constant value.

Attached below is the sample Process Assessment tool from the Academy. I highlighted the cell red for my questions and please take a look at the formula bar for reference.

What is that 50%? Just to get the overall total process stability and application stability?


What are the 60 and 8 values here?

Can you explain the computation here, please?

The 8?

What is 2/3?

The 8 and 20?

I’m not sure how to use this or how to change the values here to be able to apply to our team. How can I come up with a certain value to assign to any position?

Thank you very much,
Ken

Hi @Kenneth_Balana,

  • 50% is the assumption value from UiPath which ensures that the ratio is always between the value (1, 0). You can check this by removing the two 50% in the formula and see that the Overall Result would not be a normalized value anymore. They want to ensure that th Overall Result will fall between 0 and 1.

  • Number 60 signifies minutes in one hour. They are here trying to convert the minutes input (AHT) to man years so they have to divide by AHT / 60 (minutes) / 8 (8 hours in working day) / 260 (working days in a year)
  • Number 8 signifies of a typical work day in hours as unit. So for example 8 hours of work in one work day.

In short, if the data is not digital the if statement will default to 0.

Else, UiPath makes another two assumptions i.e., 10% of input data may result in exceptions during the robot execution and 50% of the time.

  • Exceptions here is failure probability lets denote that as “q”
  • 1-Exceptions is then the success denoted as “p”

In this case (1-0.05) will return the success probability

1-0.05-0.50 (Here for some rason UiPath is assuming that of the 95% success there will be 50% chances that they may fail) = 0.45’

I need to look at some statistics 101, why they choose 50% here. My bet is that 50% is a sample proportion, which ensures that without seeing the data we assume 50% of it will be sucess and rest will be failures.

Sample Proportion : 6.3: The Sample Proportion - Statistics LibreTexts

100 - 0.10 (Digital Data - here UiPath assumes 10% may also not be good data) = 0.90

So finally for Else block would return : 0.45 * 0.90 * Weight(ScoreCard) for process complexity this value will always be between 0 to 1 as well.


  • Number 8 signifies of a typical work day in hours as unit. So for example 8 hours of work in one work day.

  • 2/3 is a ratio assumed by UiPath. If for a process your AHT reduction is assumed to be more then you can increase this ratio and decrease if it is opposite.

Since we did not have no many specific roles in the team, we just added a value to show that the Developers themselves will also be for example, operations support.

RPA Operations Support (RPA Developer)

This way you will not have to do any extended changes in this sheet.

Hope this helps you and others. The only formula I have some doubts over is why UiPath 50% as in 1-Exceptions-0.50. May be someone who knows more about the reason can reply here. If it is not sample proportion, I am not sure what it can be.

2 Likes

Hi @jeevith ,

Again, thank you for the quality of support that you were giving to the community. This is very useful and I hope they will find the same.

I wish I could give you back in return by helping the community as well :slight_smile:

Best regards,
Ken

Hi @Kenneth_Balana,

My pleasure. I get to learn a lot from the answers in this forum.

In my opinion UiPath needs to improve the Business Analyst course or make a dedicated course covering this Process Assessment Excel template.

I know why this is not a priority for UiPath. Automation Hub gets priority over this Process Assessment Excel template. Automation Hub requires license, so the only way to get support on supplementary information is through some blogs or community forum. Also in my opinion, the excel tool is much more flexible than automation hub and you can add all the macros you want to it unlike automation hub, which is completely locked product.

Regarding giving back to the community: slow and steady. As you learn new tricks, you will see people struggling with the same things which you have already mastered. All you have to do then is share your approach in the forum.

You are well on your way :slight_smile:

1 Like

Please show me Process Assessment Tool. Where I can find it? Thank you.

Hi Dr Hegde,
could you please further explain why E38(Benefit/Suitability) is used in E43(Error Reduction), while E25(defined as “Errors”) hasn’t been considered? thank you!

Hi @jeevith
Would it be possible to share the Pugh matrix that you created for the RPA assessment?

Thank you,

Hi @Kenneth_Balana can you please share the Process Assessment tool and General Process Assessment excel templates for my reference.

Thanks in Advance

They are listed inside the Intro to UiPath training: UiPath Academy
However, I can not get them to unzip/extract.

Hi Guys,

I cannot find Process Assessment tool in the academy. Can someone let me know how can I download it? Or let me know from what course I can download it.

Update.
I found it. is in “Introduction to automation” course at the end of “How do I identify automation opportunities?” chapter.

Thanks in advance
Tomasz

Hello everyone,

I’ve found an even more comprehensive document for evaluating a process, but there are plenty of formulas I don’t understand. Why have some parameters been set to such values?

For example, here, to calculate the % automation, what does the 50% represent, as well as the 10%:
image

Also, how were these different highlighted percentages in yellow determined?

Then, in the Assumptions Effort sheet, there’s a table showing the distribution of roles based on the effort provided (low, medium, high):

In my case, not all roles mentioned in this sheet are present. There’s only a Project Manager and an RPA Developer. How could I adapt the weights in this situation?

Thank you very much for your help.

This is the excel file to download : Process Assessment Tool.xlsx (102,3 Ko)