What to Look for When Choosing an RPA Service Provider
Original post from https://www.cigen.com.au/cigenblog/
A PwC survey from 2017 that interviewed 1379 CEOs from 79 countries, found that 98% of C-level executives believe that robotic process automation is important or extremely important to their business.
This is nicely corroborated by Deloitte’s report suggestively titled The Robots Are Coming, according to which one out of three respondents among shared services and Global Service Leaders view RPA as a higher technology priority than analytical software or cloud computing.
Some facts that back such findings are RPA benefits such as immediate cost savings of 25-50%, 35-50% higher staff productivity, or 30-50% faster average processing times. If RPA seems to become the new must in the world of business, it may be time for you to also start looking for a best-fit RPA service provider.
In case you are mulling over implementation but you are still in doubt as to whether you’re ready to deal with it proficiently, you may find some answers among these seven ways for discovering if your company is ready for automation.
Assuming that you have business objectives like the optimisation of the accounting department, the reduction of operating expenses, the improvement of your company’s services, or a better name among potential clients, identifying an appropriate RPA service provider is a necessary precondition.
There are definitely different criteria to be kept in mind depending on the industry sector that your company is part of, but there are also some generally applicable principles that should guide your choice of a provider. These generic principles are what we’ll be talking about in what follows.
How to choose and RPA service provider
When you’re searching for an RPA service provider that is well suited for your company, you should be paying attention to two sets of criteria, vendor-related and software-related.
Vendor-related criteria for RPA service providers
1. Vendor experience
The most suitable provider for you is one that has worked with other companies, similar in relevant respects (e.g., size, industry sector) to yours. This is because such a vendor would understand both the needs (and, consequently, the objectives), and the kinds of processes that your company is based on.
As a consequence, such a provider could speed up the implementation process by using pre-built ‘plug and play’ robots, and thus decrease the time until the benefits start to manifest themselves.
2. Commitment to staying up-to-date with technological advances
The digital world is constantly developing, and this is the main reason why vendor’s investment in technological innovation is relevant to you. We suggest that you look for RPA vendor companies that offer major product releases yearly, and even more frequent minor releases.
You can check if this is the case by asking the potential vendor to share with you their plans for product development. What you want to see there are concrete ways of including technological progress in the development of new software.
3. Proactive customer support
24/7 technical support during implementation is crucial for successfully leveraging software robots. The RPA service provider that is right for you should be able to offer personalised support via email, phone, or demos during the whole of your automation journey. Should your demands change as you move forward, a vendor to-be-considered must be able to adapt and meet your new requirements.
4. Far-reaching customer training
If your RPA journey is to be successful, training tools are necessary for both business users and developers. In order to support a successful enterprise, the vendor should be able to ensure not only onsite and external training, but also to facilitate access to online libraries.
Efficiently learning RPA can happen in a number of ways – e.g., webinars, videos, online documentation of tutorials, release notes, information about best practices. The prospective service provider should grant you access to these various means.
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Software-related criteria for RPA service providers
1. Ease of implementation and assimilation into the existing systems of your company. Flexibility is a core feature of software that can integrate seamlessly with a wide range of different technologies, such as business process management suite, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, Citrix applications, etc.
This flexibility can accommodate more easily the complexities of the automation journey, from the proof of concept all the way to scaling to enterprise level. According to UiPath, the quick establishment of an RPA product can decrease the implementation costs up to nine times.
2. Reduced cost of ownership
This includes the implementation cost, the vendor licence fees, and the maintenance costs. The former has been touched upon before. With respect to the licence fees, we recommend that you run a thorough assessment of the total vendor license fee you will pay, especially since the pricing models of the main RPA actors on the market are different.
It is highly important that you do not dismiss the necessary investment in bots’ maintenance, required by the changes in terms of inputs and bot configurations. Although the financial cost is difficult to establish, you should take into account the qualitative benefits of the ease of maintenance, e.g., increased employee productivity and job satisfaction.
3. Technical criteria
You need to assess the compatibility between a particular RPA tool and your company’s technological guidelines with respect to:
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Software and hardware system requirements
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Security
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Screen scraping capabilities
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Prospect of intelligent automation
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The company – specific hierarchy of means and goals.
4. Features that maximise the return on investment
Robot capabilities, scalability, and reliability are among the features with most impact. Can the software interact with other computer systems and applications for the automation of routine, rules-based user tasks? Is it easy to setup additional servers via advanced production management?
How much does the software rely on mimicking individual users’ actions, which are difficult to generalise to other users? These are just some of the questions that you should pose before selecting the RPA tool that’s right for you.
Conclusion
We’ve already discussed the topic of choosing an appropriate RPA tool, so you can see there a checklist to help you make a decision there, and why we chose to work exclusively with UiPath.
When it comes to robotic process automation tools, the core idea is that the selection should be based on harmonising your business goals with the vendors’, as well as the RPA software’s specific traits. Start from crystal-clear knowledge as to what you’re looking for in an RPA service provider.
To this end, develop your awareness of the technology’s benefits and limitations. Find out more from our 30+ page eBook on how to start your automation journey in 4 easy steps.
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