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3 Ways to Ensure a Successful RPA Platform Migration

4 min read
Dec 23, 2021 9:30:00 AM

Whether you’re looking to migrate your automation portfolio to an upgraded version of your RPA tool or another RPA platform altogether, the success of your effort hinges on a variety of factors. After all, migrating digital workforces isn’t for the faint of heart.

To help you along the RPA platform migration journey – whether it’s to leverage new features and capabilities of an upgraded version or new RPA tool, simplify and democratize automation, or reduce costs – these three best practices will ensure a successful RPA platform migration.

1. Define Your RPA Platform Migration Metrics

You’ve already defined why you’re migrating your automation portfolio. The metrics you’re going to use to measure the success of that migration will naturally be tied to the reasons you’re upgrading or switching RPA vendors, but that’s at a high level. Reducing costs, gaining new features and capabilities, making automation more accessible to the average business user is all well and good, but analytics you can track and report on are paramount.

We believe it is best to get more granular with specific metrics and KPIs.

During the migration itself, we recommend tracking:

  • The migration time of each automated process
  • The number of steps in each digital worker (to give you a sense of migration by complexity)
  • The percentage of each automated process that needs to be redesigned for the destination RPA platform

These three metrics are the foundation on which you will build. Once you’re in your destination RPA tool tracking the following KPIs will help justify your decision to switch:

  • Decreased design time
  • Decreased development time
  • Increased uptime
  • Decreased total cost of ownership
  • Increased reusability % of automated processes
  • Increases in end-to-end processes being automated with more complexity

2. Analyze and Improve Your Existing Automations

From improved pricing models to better feature-functionality that will enable more complex, end-to-end automation, it can be easy to be blinded by the opportunities that a new RPA tool promises.

Yet few see it as an opportunity to put your current automation portfolio under the microscope and identify ways those automated processes can be improved or retired if they’re no longer needed.

In a recent panel on RPA platform migration, Blueprint CEO Dan Shimmerman pointed out,

“We (Blueprint) insert a decision point prior to migration that allows our customers to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute! Do we want to migrate this in its as-is state? Do we want to add improvements or optimization to that migration?’ And very often, the data suggests, ‘We need to retire this automation altogether.’ And so, creating this decision point, prior to kicking it over into production, we believe we’re introducing yet another success factor to the customer.”

It’s safe to say, a successful RPA platform migration isn’t just about getting your digital workforce from one RPA tool to another in a timely, cost-effective manner. Success is also about scrutinizing your entire portfolio of bots to address gaps, waste, and remove unnecessary automations that aren’t needed anymore instead of spending the time, effort, and money in maintaining them.

That’s exactly what Blueprint, in conjunction with Microsoft, was able to do for a major telecom customer that was migrating from Automation Anywhere to Microsoft Power Automate. In that same panel discussion, Stephen Siciliano, GM Power Automate at Microsoft, explained,

“One of the nice things about doing a [RPA] migration that this customer has seen is the opportunity to retire things that are no longer needed. So, of the 2000 bots [slated for migration], I think there's actually a few hundred that they've realized they don't need to carry forward, which ultimately will save them time and energy.”

Read the full case study here

3. Find a Partner That Can Help You Migrate, Instead of Doing it Manually

The biggest barrier to migration is the time and effort required to migrate. Most companies take on this endeavor manually—asking developers to recode entire bot portfolios from scratch in a new platform—naturally, this exercise is what creates the massive overhead that puts people off migration.

For example, a simple automation with mid-level complexity can cost up to $10k and take 4-6 weeks to migrate. What happens if you have hundreds, or even thousands of bots that you’d like to move to a new RPA platform? The math isn’t that complicated but swallowing that cost most certainly is.

That’s why it’s so important to find a partner that can help you migrate. With RPA platform migration being such a hot topic, there’s no better option on the market than Blueprint.

Blueprint can help you migrate between any of the leading RPA platforms in a fraction of the time and at 25-30% of the cost. There is no other solution right now that can do that.

Blueprint even helps you track those all-important migration metrics and gives you an opportunity to improve all your existing automation and get rid of the ones you don’t need.

Get in touch with one of our solution experts and we can even give you a free estimate on migration. If you’re interested in seeing how our technology works, just watch the demo below.