Painting the Digital Future of Enterprises with RPA

RPA has undoubtedly become the kingpin of global digitization initiatives, bringing in mammoth business transformation and success over the last five years.

RPA was the untrodden path for businesses. But, it is seamlessly functioning outside the enterprise mission control systems like Mainframes, HRMS, and ERPs, smoothly automating the legacy processes in the back-end to magnify productivity and returns. And, all it asked for was access to the system of record to create the magic!

RPA vendors worked towards cementing the RPA goals with a wholesome buffet of over-offerings and unnecessarily confusing choices.

But, magic tricks seem impossible to believe in the mere blink of an eye. Especially with the boot-strap fund during the current pandemic-stuck market scenario, offering a full suite of bells and whistles will not work. Instead, it's best to target the bite-sized appetite for the change.

RPA Powering the Next-Gen

Such topical problems call for prompt solutions, where RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) plays the hero. This cloud-first resource eliminates all transition issues introduced by the on-premise platforms, making the service flexible, scalable, and bite-sized. In addition, the convenience-centric RPAaaS solution assures zero infrastructural costs without restrictive licenses and lock-ins, making it a must-have choice to complete the enterprise automation strategy.

RPAaaS at Work

Earlier RPAaaS services gave away free bots like confetti, creating misconceptions of a bot being adequate to design and run an automated process. Moreover, such offerings forgot to highlight the complexities faced by the developers while creating new business services from scratch. Any transformative business service forms the epicenter of the enterprise's IT landscape, seamlessly managing and routing data across related systems.

A stout process needs to be adequately supported by technologies like machine learning to be human-like and natural language processing capabilities to crack the associated nuances.

To enable the process scripts to be drafted in multiple languages, accessing alternatives like SSH and Powershell is necessary to complete the toolkit. Simple "drag and drop" functionalities pinned in a typical environment, driven by a single subscription platform, powering the required technologies in varied scripting languages is necessary to drive the digital transformation goals.

Processes Don't Survive in Seclusion

"Volatility over complexity" is what defines today's era; still, technological adoption is slower than expectation and imagination. Though business leaders need not spend time decoding the scripts that underline automation, knowledge is essential to make future-proof decisions. And RPAaaS can help secure business value by allowing teams to experiment and prioritize candidate clusters. It gets easy to identify the processes that yield maximum business value without committing to hefty infrastructural costs and operating licenses.

The mantra to RPA adoption success is – Start Small but Dream Big.

Prioritizing the day-to-day robotic tasks should be the first step of action. For example, at AutomationEdge, we have seen 40% of help desk queries are repetitive requests for a password reset, this could be a POC (Proof of Concept) worthy use case.

Typically, processes span across many systems, comprising of records maintained by numerous departments. Therefore, selecting a perfect RPA platform that can integrate with such systems — both current and predicted future — would surely expand the scope of automating the business processes.

An intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) can critically eliminate the underlying need for training. In addition, it assures maintaining the planned total cost of ownership (TCO) for seamless implementation. RPA customers have been surprised by the not-so-predicted costs of consulting, integration, maintenance, and training compiled to reach an aggregate TCO.

No Unused Shelfware Created

Earlier, no one had a real clue of the number of bot licenses required, so early RPA customers ended up over-investing in them. Some firms dedicatedly invested in one bot license for each user, while others purchased one for each automated process.

Topped up with its pondering license costs, each bot has multiplied the investment beyond expectation and actual need. A substantial part of these bills included unutilized bots or those that were just forgotten for a while.

With a lack of tracking systems, the customer was left holding the bag on unutilized shelfware. A target-oriented, quality RPAaaS solution should effectively monitor and track all operations without human intervention or worries.

Conclusion

RPAaaS has vivified the RPA market, galvanizing its brighter future with more customers readily investing in RPAaaS due to the low-risk nature involved. Also, the flexibility of trying it out in their environments is what creates the magic.

Consider the pro-tips outlined above before investing in an RPAaaS solution to assure RPA is becoming the required golden feather in your enterprise's digital hat.

Author

Uday Birajdar

CEO & Co-founder, AutomationEdge

My name is Uday Birajdar, co-founder and CEO at AutomationEdge.

I have been passionate about technology being a paradigm-shifting agent of change for enterprises in the short term and for society in the long run.

Very quickly, it became evident to me, that automation is important and the scope of automation went far beyond IT automation to business process automation. This epiphany led to the founding of AutomationEdge (www.automationedge.com), which started by addressing the foundations of IT process automation.

Uniquely, today analyst firms recognize the leadership of AutomationEdge in AI, RPA (Robotic Process Automation), and ITPA (IT Process Automation).