A Beginner’s Guide to RPA Platform Migration

The RPA software market is quickly evolving. New vendors are entering the space, and the traditional leaders continue to jockey for position, adding new features and capabilities to their products.

RPA programs are also maturing. With that evolution comes the realization that the initial automation platform they selected might not be the one that’s best suited to their needs now.

Those needs may revolve around costs, returns, ease of RPA delivery, or a host of other factors.

Learn More: 5 Signs it’s Time to Switch RPA Platforms

Whatever the drivers may be, automation programs or the service integrators (SI) they work with are aggressively looking to migrate their RPA operations and portfolios to a better-suited platform that enables them to deliver on their business objectives.

But RPA migration is no easy feat. It can be incredibly expensive and time-consuming. That’s why it’s essential to take a structured approach to migration and answer some key questions before you take the plunge.

In this article, we outline what those questions are and what you need to define before jumping into the complexity of migrating your digital workforce to another RPA platform, to ensure a cost-effective and seamless migration that delivers the returns and results you’re after.

1. Define Your Objectives

Switching RPA vendors can be a costly, resource-consuming endeavor. An initiative of this magnitude may even require executive sponsorship.

Defining your objectives for RPA platform migration not only enables you to communicate this need clearly and get executive backing, but it will also help you identify what you’re looking for in another RPA vendor.

For this, we suggest an inverted approach that allows you to define where your current RPA tool is falling short and how a potential vendor can address and solve for those needs.

Here are the main questions you’ll need to answer:

• What are the pain points and challenges with your current vendor that are preventing your RPA program from maximizing returns?
  
  It might be helpful here to break this question down into more granular elements of analysis such as:

• • Cost – Is your current RPA vendor too expensive?
  • Complexity – Is your current RPA tool too technical and complex, limiting RPA design and delivery to specialized FTEs (full-time employees) that throttles delivery?
  • Time to value – Does it take too long to develop and deploy bots with your current RPA platform?
  • Insufficient returns – did your RPA tool make promises in terms of ROI that haven’t been realized?
• Are there features and capabilities you need that your current RPA platform doesn’t have? Does another platform offer specific capabilities that are better suited for you?
• Are usability and UX sub-optimal?
• Is your organization running on multiple RPA platforms? Is it possible to consolidate automation in one platform that would appease both your RPA CoE (Center of Excellence) and each line of business that has a hand in automation?
• What do you want to achieve by migrating your bot portfolio and automation ops to another RPA platform?
  
  This is where you invert your pain points identified above. For example, if it’s ease of bot delivery, better integration with enterprise architecture, and reduced overhead costs you want, there’s your answer.

By considering and answering these questions, you’ll be able to both build a solid business case for migration and define exactly what you’re looking for in a new RPA platform that will enable you to deliver on your automation and business objectives.

2. Which RPA Platform Will Help You Deliver on Those Objectives?

Once you’ve identified the barriers and shortcomings of your current RPA platform, you can now start searching for an RPA vendor that solves those challenges.

This process doesn’t have to be an independent undertaking, and, in most cases, it isn’t. Your pain points can be brought in front of analysts, consultants, and the service integrators you work with who understand the automation software market and can provide suggestions based on the criteria you’ve defined and the objectives you want to achieve.

Following the example we outlined above, if it’s ease of bot delivery, better integration with enterprise architecture, and reduced overhead costs you’re after, then an SI, consultant, or analyst can give you a list of recommendations. Microsoft Power Automate will most likely top that list.

3. Define a Timeline for Migration

Once you’ve identified a target RPA platform that you’d like to migrate your digital workforce to, the next logical step would be defining a migration timeline.

Because of the inherent complexities involved with migration, switching vendors can be a drawn-out process. That’s why it’s essential to hold the project accountable with solid timelines instead of letting it get off track, allowing migration costs to soar.

Here are a few tips that can help keep the migration on course and set some structure to the process and timeline for migration:

• Set your expectations. Migration is a lengthy process. However, there are ways to accelerate it, but know, it won’t be done overnight.
• Focus on migrating logical groups of processes. This might look like migrating processes by department (IT automated processes, Finance processes, HR processes, etc.).
• Account for delays and unexpected complications in the migration process. RPA tools specify process automations differently. There will be minor roadblocks that will require some intervention.
• Find the right support for the project at hand. Finding providers that can help you migrate faster, minimize the manual effort needed, and reduce the risk of migration is crucial and leads us to our next point.

4. Who Can Help You Migrate?

Whether it’s the service integrators, third-party consultants, or RPA programs themselves taking it on, migration isn’t easy. Historically, the only way to migrate has been by rebuilding bots manually because RPA platforms specify process automations differently.

That’s all changed. Blueprint has the only RPA platform migration solution available on the market that accelerates migration by 3x while reducing costs by 75%.

We can do this because of our extensive mapping library that we call COM (Common Object Model). COM ingests bots from the leading RPA platforms and deconstructs the automation elements from these major RPA platforms into generic representations, so they can be converted into other RPA formats.

It’s how we’re migrating 15,000 bots for one of our customers from Automation Anywhere into Microsoft Power Automate where 70% of the process flow actions migrated into Power Automate need no human touchpoint.

Read the full case study here

If you’d like help getting started on your migration journey, we can even offer you a free estimate based on your current RPA tool, the platform you’d like to migrate to, and the size of your bot portfolio. Just click the link below to get started.