By Chris Porter, CEO, NexBotix

This month marks one year since the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic – a global disease which has impacted every aspect of our lives.

From a professional life perspective, the switch to remote working has, in the most part, run smoothly and allowed employees to continue to be productive while away from their usual working environment.

The success has been, in no small part, down to technology, allowing staff to have all the necessary access to corporate information and the ability to communicate with colleagues while in the comfort of their own home. Employers that hadn’t previously encouraged or supported remote working hastily scrambled to implement policies and remote access infrastructure.

It is part of a huge digital transformation drive over the past 12 months. As companies have adjusted to the ‘new normal’, they have hurriedly explored ways in which to streamline processes, harness data or shape entirely new ways of doing business. A major asset in the transformation process has been automation. According to a survey by Deloitte, 68% of execs have used automation to directly address COVID-19 related problems.

Robotic-process automation (RPA) has experienced massive growth in recent years. According to Gartner, it is the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market and estimates that 85% of large and very large organisations will deploy some form of RPA. It’s ability to enhance the workflow for time-consuming, high-volume & repeatable tasks means it has been of particular benefit to sectors such as financial services and healthcare.

Many companies have taken RPA a step further by investing in Intelligent Automation (IA) – a term used to describe a group of technologies – including RPA, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, OCR, NLP and analytics – that are integrated with each other to automate more complex business processes. On their own, these technologies deliver limited value. When combined, they can unlock significant value and transform the way businesses operate.

However, the past year has seen many IT departments become overwhelmed with the urgent need to service a workforce which is entirely decentralized. This burden can be heightened within resource-stretched mid-market firms, which may not have the means to build a team of in-house experts to deploy, support and scale automation. Understanding which business processes to automate and the type of automation to deploy, or even the extent to which automation can help the organisation, can be challenging without the right expertise.

So, what are the most important factors when selecting an automation vendor and solution for your business, and crucially, what is the total cost of ownership?

Software Costs

Automation tools come with various license models, often referred to as ‘bot licenses’. These licenses are linked to a resource that can be used to execute multiple processes, but it’s important to remember that each resource or bot can only do one thing at a time. Most vendors have a minimum commitment in terms of the number of licenses and a minimum license term, so you may have already committed to a higher bot capacity than you really need when starting out with your automation programme. Then, once your bots are fully utilised you will need to buy more, further increasing your total cost of ownership.

Other more flexible license models do exist in the market, such as consumption or transactional licensing, where you only pay for the work being completed. If you scale the solution, the cost will go up but in a more manageable way. There are pros and cons to each model, but the key takeaway is that you should make sure you maximise your utilisation to avoid having expensive bots sat around idle.

Resource Costs

Like any technology, automation needs to be delivered in a tightly controlled way to ensure standards are met and outcomes are achieved successfully. Developers, Project Managers, Business Analysts and IT staff are all involved in an automation project. Many software vendors will claim that their tools can be deployed with no specialist skills in a matter of days. This simply isn’t true for unattended automation..

Deciding to work with a professional services partner or consulting firm can de-risk the resourcing of your project for you, but this option has its own associated costs. Taking things further, if you want to staff your own ‘Centre of Excellence’, you will also need to consider operational roles for the governance and management of your automation capability. This will extend to Business Analysts, Project Managers, Developers, Testers, and change management resources.

Infrastructure Costs

Your new software robots will need somewhere to work. This comes in the form of servers, databases, and virtual desktops, where they will interact with your organisations applications. For most RPA and Intelligent Automation vendors, each robot needs its own virtual desktop to execute business processes.

Servers can be provisioned on premise by your IT team or hosted in a virtual private cloud with one of the many cloud hosting services.  There are also a number of Software-as-a-Service options in the marketplace, where all the infrastructure is included in the offering. Either way, servers cost money and the larger your implementation, the more these servers will cost to provision and run overtime. You will also need to consider the cost of any operating systems and application licenses needed to run on these servers to match your production environment.

Maintenance

Depending on the technology you have deployed, you may need to manually schedule your automations to run every month, depending on your business needs. This requires additional resources, beyond your development and testing teams, to keep your bots working properly. Any changes in underlying applications will need to be monitored in case they introduce bugs or defects, and your maintenance team will need to work closely with business operations to manage things like business continuity planning and change requests over time.

In summary, it is vital when selecting an automation partner that you establish details of costs to implement, run and maintain the solution across its entire lifecycle. Only then can you fully start to realise the benefits of automation, including increased operational efficiency, enhanced accuracy and happier employees.