London partners Mike Pierides and Simon Lightman and Dubai partner Rebecca L. Kelly recently authored the article “Contracting for RPA” in The Oath, wherein they share insights on the deployment of robotic process automation (RPA) for businesses in the Middle East.
RPA offers a multitude of benefits, from speed and scalability of process execution to cost savings, to freeing up employees to focus on aspects of their jobs that are intrinsically “human” in nature. However, the flipside to RPA’s speed and scale of execution is that any errors in the process steps undertaken by the robot or within the robot’s underlying code can result in errors and omissions that quickly and consistently disseminate in ways that would be unheard of in a human-led operation.
As a result, RPA both presents technology-specific challenges, for example, surrounding the selection and deployment of the RPA solution, and potentially compounds the traditional risks associated with implementation challenges, service risks such as errors and omissions, and vendor lock-in.
In the article, Mike, Simon, and Rebecca discuss some of the common themes they have seen emerge when procuring, implementing, and operating RPA solutions.