The Challenge
Challenge #1 – Restrained Scale and Speed
One of the biggest challenges Avanade’s Managed Services encountered included restrained scale and speed in managing their customers’ automations. Core business processes changed frequently and it was difficult keeping automations optimized, innovative, and aligned with the changing business at the speed needed.
As a result, Avanade identified a real opportunity to convert existing automations to a newer generation RPA platform like Microsoft Power Automate and convert micro-tactical automations to broader end-to-end process automations. This drastically reduces automation overhead instead of having 7 or 8 automations for one process in an outdated tool.
Challenge #2 – Legacy Automation
Deficiencies The other challenge Avanade was encountering was poor customer experiences due to legacy automation deficiencies. Again, because automations were built and deployed on early versions of RPA platforms, they were challenging to optimize and update, leading to a deficiency in delivery excellence.
In modernizing automations for newer-generation RPA platforms, developers would often discover that the automation should be retired because the maintenance and support it required outweighed the value it was delivering. But, this discovery was only made after extensive effort and investigation had already been invested.
“There’s a lot of organizations out there with messy automation estates seeing underwhelming ROI. It’s a big reason why we’re seeing so many migration motions to optimize those estates on Microsoft Power Automate.”
Avanade’s Automation Factory team needed a solution for their automation teams that support millions of bots across numerous clients that are expensive, are missing the mark on ROI, and require real optimization and migration to better intelligent automation platforms to deliver improved total cost of ownership and ROI.
The Solution
To enable scale and speed in modernizing their clients’ automation estates and optimizing the entire lifecycle of their automation portfolios, Avanade partnered with Blueprint. Using Blueprint’s Automation Re-platforming capabilities, Avanade’s Automation Factory Team could ingest entire automation estates and understand an estate’s complexities, utilization, actions, and derive value from just a lift and shift motion. This is possible due to Blueprint’s Common Object Model, a vast library of commands, services, and actions that also enables the instant visualization of the portability of automation portfolios into other RPA tools.
“When we run and ingest automation estates through Blueprint, the analytics that come out for our internal teams is eye-opening. We can grab a client’s existing automation estate, understand it, rationalize it, and get control of it in weeks versus months in manual tools with manual resources.”
- Frank Catone, Global Intelligent Automation Director, Avanade
Blueprint’s COM maps automation estates into the leading RPA vendors, so Avanade’s Automation Factory Team can see how much of an estate can be re-platformed, how much effort is required, and understand what can happen at scale.
Avanade and Blueprint were also able to build comprehensive, fact-based business cases for automation modernization and re-platforming. Whether the client is interested in simply migrating digital workforces or optimizing them, Blueprint and Avanade can show them a path while tying it all back to business value through decreased licensing fees or taking advantage of more infrastructure extensibility.
In terms of extensibility, there is no better example than Microsoft. Moving automations to Microsoft Power Automate has become a major interest for many of Avanade’s clients because of the reduction in TCO it presents. An automation running in any other leading RPA vendor can be 30-80% cheaper in Microsoft Power Automate. There are also benefits to be made on the design and deployment sides of automation. For example, Avanade can deploy automations 25% faster for their customers with Power Automate, which can open Excel with one click instead of having to code 10 actions to do the same in another RPA tool.
The Results
By using Blueprint, Avanade is able to easily flip entire automation accounts into Microsoft Power Automate and showcase to their clients all the intelligent, end-to-end automation that’s unlocked, while lowering their own operational expenses.
When migrating automation estates, the analytics Blueprint provides enables Avanade’s Automation Factory Team to take out roughly 40-60% of their build effort and modernize automation estates at scale versus doing it manually. To put that into dollars, a simple automation to be re-platformed would cost roughly $30,000. Because of Avanade’s expertise and their partnership with Blueprint, Avanade is able to get that figure down to ~$10,000.
There are two major clients they have been able to do this for:
The first, a major Global Communications & High Tech Company. By leveraging Avanade’s Legacy Automation Migration Factory and the Blueprint’s re-platforming and automation analytics capabilities, they were able to migrate the client’s existing automations over to Microsoft Power Automate and save Avanade’s Operations Team 27% in TCO each year.
The second is a Global Software Company. By using Blueprint, Avanade was able to migrate the client’s existing automations over to Microsoft Power Automate which not only saved Avanade’s Operations Team 20% in TCO each year, but it also enabled the team to optimize the automations 30% faster with Microsoft Power Automate and cut deployment time down by 30% resulting in increased ROI and client business impact.
"When migrating automation estates, there are a few pieces to the process: design, build, test, and deploy. The analytics Blueprint provides has allowed us to take out 40-60% of our build cycles, but with Blueprint’s analytics, we’re also able to accelerate and improve design, testing, and deployment."
- Frank Catone, Global Intelligent Automation Director, Avanade
