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5 Signs It’s Time to Switch RPA Platforms

4 min read
Nov 11, 2021 9:30:00 AM

Now, more than ever, there’s a lot of noise and movement being made in the automation market as RPA programs look to migrate their entire digital workforces and switch RPA platforms.

Abandoning your RPA platform for another that can deliver the returns and scale you were promised at the beginning of your RPA journey is one way to do it. Companies that have taken the leap are reaping the benefits of switching to an RPA vendor that better suits their needs and solves their challenges.

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But how do you know when it’s time to switch? Here are 5 tell-tale signs it might be time to take your portfolio of bots elsewhere:

1. It Takes Too Long to Deliver Automations

One of the biggest pain points we keep coming across in the field is how long it takes to deliver automated processes. From identification to prioritization, design, development, and deployment, RPA programs struggle at every stage of the automation delivery lifecycle.

While there is help on the way as technology providers mature to fill in the gaps, especially where identification and prioritization are concerned with task capture solutions, it’s the design and development stages that are really causing delays.

RPA was sold on the ability to scale and see meaningful returns in the form of cost reduction and increased task quality and efficiency. Unfortunately, the time to delivery is still too long, leaving RPA programs floundering with a smaller bot portfolio than what they projected and asks for more investment and resources falling on deaf ears because they haven’t delivered on the objectives and goals, they themselves defined.

One solution to this challenge is switching to an RPA platform that makes it easier to design and develop bots, especially as the ease of implementation and delivery was definitely oversold by some vendors, leading us into the next point.  

2. Your RPA Platform Oversold and Underdelivered

RPA was sold on the idea that the Citizen Developer – a technically proficient business user – could drive and deliver automation. It was a very nice idea, but completely unrealistic.

Learn More: Why RPA Tools Were Never Able to Empower the Citizen Developer

RPA at its core is complex software development. The technical skills needed for business users to deliver automation were simply too high. With the right automation design solutions, they could quickly identify, prioritize, and design bots to be developed, but expecting them to do all the heavy lifting in an RPA studio was never going to materialize.

That no longer has to be the case. Major vendors are emerging that make it much easier for the average business user to deliver automations. If you feel like your RPA platform is too complex and relies on IT too much, there’s another sign it might be time to make a move.

3. You’re Seeing Underwhelming Returns

The inability to scale your automation practice and get that elusive ROI that was promised is one major sign it might time to consider a switch to another RPA vendor. Another, is the crippling RPA maintenance and support that prevent meaningful returns.

It turns out that bots are a lot more brittle than initially advertised. Suppose you’re struggling with constant break-fix cycles, that’s an indication it might be time to consider an RPA platform that enables more resilient bots or has the governance, change management, and impact analysis capabilities needed to avoid the outages and errors that keep costs high and prevent scale.  

4. You’re Using More than One RPA Platform

A lot of organizations today are using multiple RPA platforms for their automation initiatives. This is normally a result of different lines of business sponsoring and implementing automation before a centralized, consolidated RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) could be established, or it’s the by-product of leveraging the capabilities of different RPA tools.

Using different RPA tools within the same organization creates a couple of problems. For one, RPA platforms are proprietary; they specify process automations in different ways, so the way in which a bot is developed in one platform, isn’t the same as how it’s developed in another, creating disparate automation design practices and a lack of quality.

Multiple RPA platforms also means paying for two vendors and sometimes, duplicated licenses which inflate your overhead. If your RPA program is using multiple vendors, it might be time to consolidate your automation efforts into one.

5. Your RPA Platform Has a New Version You Can’t Upgrade To

Lastly, a big portion of Automation Anywhere customers are finding it hard to upgrade to their new A2019 version. Compatibility between the old V11 version and A2019 hasn’t exactly been sorted, so entire digital workforces in some cases need to be built from scratch to work in the same platform, just another version.

In a lot of cases, this has driven customers to abandon ship and seek calmer waters elsewhere. If this is also you, maybe it’s time you got on the Blueprint lifeboat too.

How Blueprint Accelerates RPA Platform Migrations while Keeping Costs Low

Historically, the only way to switch RPA vendors was to do it manually. That meant rebuilding entire bot portfolios from scratch in a new, target RPA platform. It wasn’t only expensive—it also took a really long time.

Blueprint however, has made RPA platform migrations much more cost effective and radically faster.

Blueprint provides an end-to-end migration solution that can take all your bots from any of the leading RPA platforms and migrate them into any new RPA tool you want to use, 3x faster while reducing costs by 75%.

Listen to our recent podcast where a live panel of automation experts discussed all things RPA migrations including:

  • What’s triggering RPA migrations into other platforms
  • The benefits and costs of moving your RPA portfolio into another vendor
  • How to measure the success of an RPA migration
  • Best practices for anyone looking to migrate RPA vendors in the next 6-12 months

Listen in and discover expert insights into the future of the RPA market and how migrating automation programs can enable scale. 

Who Moved My Bots Podcast - RPA Migration