BrainBlog for Robocorp by Jason Bloomberg
I recently attended the customer conference for one of the first generation or ‘Gen1’ Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vendors. After speaking with a number of this vendor’s customers, one common theme emerged.
Enterprise RPA initiatives are complex, time-consuming, and expensive. They require a diverse team of professionals to create and maintain the bots – typically by bringing SI partners onto the team.
These customers were generally happy with this heavyweight state of affairs, as the cost efficiencies they were able to achieve exceeded the costs, thus providing a positive ROI.
It occurred to me, however, that there must be a better way of implementing RPA – one that doesn’t only focus on the highest value bots that are necessary to cover the significant costs of the effort.
Understanding the RPA Long Tail
Gen1 RPA vendors are as successful as they are because their customers are able to implement a relative handful of bots that deliver this high ROI.
There are many more possible automations, however, that are simply not cost-effective to implement with these heavyweight, enterprise-class tools.
In fact, if you were to rank all possible automations from most valuable to the organization to the least valuable, the high cost of Gen1 RPA would prevent all but a small group of automations at the high end of this value ranking from returning a positive ROI.
The rest of the automations represent the long tail – automations that would only be cost-effective to implement if the per-bot cost of implementation were lower.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
