Is an RPA platform or is a Partner most important when starting or continuing your automation journey?
This is a question we are often asked, and the answer isn’t always clear. As RPA started to take off in 2016/2017 the focus was on enterprise RPA vendors, e.g. UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and others. They all made promises that the technology would just work with little-to-no guidance or support, that they had a very clear and immediate ROI and the solutions would be built resiliently. Large ISP’s treated RPA similar to the way they implemented other enterprise technologies: throw resources at the problem with either too much strategy or not enough. I’ve read a statistic out there that says close to 50% of RPA projects fail. You can appreciate why this is the experience of too many. Often times, reasons that automations aren’t successful is because: a) there is not enough definition around the overall need and/or b) there is a lack of understanding of how to identify, create, and continue discovering more processes to automate. As I have shared before, the main reason I started CampTek Software, was because there is an obvious need for “support.” The bots need to be supported for their entire life cycle, from the analysis/discovery phase, development, testing/acceptance, and through production/hyper care, and legacy support.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about RPA Managed Services or Automation as a Service etc. as the “next step” in the lifecycle of RPA. The truth is anyone who understands the technology and has successfully built a longstanding automation program has either created an internal managed services or has relied on an external managed service provider like CampTek Software to help them with managing technical debt, minimizing costs and providing a reliable backbone to automate their enterprise. I started this business close to five years ago as I understood the capabilities of these RPA platforms, as well as their limitations, but also recognized the opportunity to provide value-added support services to ensure that the bots created are given the long-care they need.
While it’s exciting to hear that even the RPA software vendors are understanding the need to provide a managed service component for their technology, the truth of the matter is that there are RPA service providers/partners have long-been successful in providing a managed service component since the beginning, because, truthfully, that was what has always been needed. You can’t build a bot and not have the structure, and tools in place to support it.
Bottom Line: Companies are now jumping on to the latest trend, who should you trust your mission critical bots to?
Written by: Peter Camp, CTO & Founder, CampTek Software
