The Challenge
As one of the world's largest telecommunications providers, this enterprise client invested heavily in process improvement and automation initiatives to stay competitive and keep their millions of customers satisfied. In 2021, their executive leadership team decided to leverage Microsoft's Power Automate solution instead of their current RPA tool, Automation Anywhere, believing that by further leaning into the Microsoft ecosystem they would be able to produce better quality bots at a lower cost.
While the move to Power Automate was the right choice, this organization was now facing the daunting task of re-coding 15,000 bots manually, or leveraging consulting and outsourced services to complete the re-platforming, which was proving to be a time consuming and cost-heavy exercise that held a high probability of error. In addition, with minimal data and understanding of their current process estate, they found it difficult to make educated decisions around how valuable any automated process was, and if it was worth spending the time, effort, and money to re-platform.
Facing years in process platform limbo, poor quality processes, and the potential of an 8-figure bill to recreate their existing processes, they turned to Blueprint for help.
The Solution
To move forwards strategically with their re-platforming, this organization desperately needed a way to analyze, assess the value of, and prioritize their automated processes before they were moved to Power Automate. Upon discovering Blueprint, they immediately found several key benefits.
When Blueprint stepped in, we helped the customer ingest and covert all of their Automation Anywhere process flows into Digital Blueprints so that they could be analyzed within the platform. Using Blueprint's dashboards and analytics, there were able to discover 609 automated processes that were high-cost, and either redundant or of poor quality. Instead of spending the time and effort to re-platform these bots, they decided to retire them instead - significantly reducing their assumed re-platforming burden and saving them $5 Million in re-platforming costs and licensing fees.
Second, due to Blueprint's Common Object Model (COM) which creates a common language between different RPA formats, they discovered that their remaining Automation Anywhere bots mapped at a rate of 70% to Microsoft Power Automate's format. This meant that only 30% of processes would need any human intervention or re-coding to run effectively within the new tool.
Last, Blueprint's hands-on training enabled this company to utilize internal resources and a community of Citizen Developers to complete this re-platforming exercise. Without Blueprint, they would have had to engage an outside services company for assistance, which would have cost them millions of dollars. The internal resources have been so effective at leveraging Blueprint to re-platform their automations, that they're completing over 90% of the work themselves, and are migrating over 100 bots per month.
In the end, Blueprint was able to help this company complete their re-platforming journey in months instead of years, all while saving over $5 million of dollars along the way.
"Blueprint helped us re-platform our automated processes for 80% less time and cost than it would have taken if we'd leveraged outside services. Their ability to analyze the value of our processes so that we avoid low-value work, and then convert processes into any RPA format we need, can best be described in one word...magical."
- Automation Engineer, Telecom CoE
