Challenges
The client is an extremely large and dispersed global organization, serving over 150 markets in more than 300 languages and dialects. With such a large global footprint, cost reduction has become a priority, particularly where RPA is concerned as UiPath – their legacy automation provider – continued to raise license fees and prices, inflating the total cost of ownership for their automation practice.
They were eager to switch to Microsoft Power Automate where they already had sizeable investments and technologies in the Microsoft ecosystem. Switching to Power Automate would reduce their licensing costs by a staggering 10x.
The challenge was how to do it quickly and cost-effectively while minimizing risk. With over 4000 automations in their RPA estate, this major Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm’s objective was to migrate nearly 500 bots in a three-month time frame in phase one, with the remainder to be moved in subsequent phases of a much larger project. Hitachi was asked to tackle 150 automations which constituted the largest and most complex automations, while the remaining 350 would be handled by the client’s citizen developers.
Solution
Having already used Blueprint for other RPA migration projects in the past, Hitachi immediately knew that Blueprint’s RPA migration solution was a perfect fit for their client’s needs.
Using Blueprint’s RPA Analytics solution as the first step of the migration process, Hitachi was able to ingest the first wave of the client’s automations to get an instant understanding of their RPA estate, the complexity of the bots, and to estimate the effort and time required to complete the first phase of the migration to Microsoft Power Automate.
“Blueprint enables us to understand a client’s RPA estate in a fraction of the time than it would take us using manual means. We’re able to quickly understand what each automation is doing, how complex and big they are, and accurately see how long the migration will take so we can budget and plan for it strategically with predictability.”
- Don Panek, Director, Rapid Solution Development, Hitachi Solutions
To meet the client’s needs and aggressive timelines, Hitachi used Blueprint to assess the client’s first wave of automations to be migrated to Power Automate in record time. They then used Blueprint’s RPA Migration Solution to automatically convert the majority of those bots to Power Automate with detailed guidance on where modifications needed to be made in Microsoft so the automations could be production-ready, saving mountains of time and money in the process.
The client’s citizen developers were swiftly trained to use Blueprint to migrate the bulk of their automations which were made up of mostly less complex and smaller bots in their estate, freeing up their developers to perform more business-critical tasks and projects.
In terms of how much time and effort Hitachi and the client stood to save, Blueprint developed an efficiency metric that tracks how much analysis and migration work Blueprint does automatically, detailed in the next section.
Outcomes
Blueprint helped Hitachi both understand the client’s RPA estate in record time and migrate their 500 bots dramatically faster than it would have taken them using manual methods. Specifically, Hitachi experienced 60-80% time savings when migrating the first wave of their 500 automations from UiPath into Microsoft Power Automate.
Based on the nearly 115 million lines of code Blueprint has already converted to Microsoft Power Automate, they can accurately discern the effort and time being conserved in the migration process.
Blueprint’s efficiency score was 79% and eliminated 986 days of effort.
With Blueprint, they were able to conclude the migration in 3 month’s time, slashing the project timeline by 92%.
In this case, Blueprint was able to convert 96% of the client’s actions from UiPath to Power Automate. The remaining 4% was made up of actions with broken selectors, actions with compiler errors, and other to-do’s denoted in Power Automate with Blueprint comments, further guiding and accelerating the development work to make those bots production-ready. For this migration, Blueprint’s efficiency score was 79% and eliminated 986 days of effort that would have been needed if the migration would have been executed manually. That means for the first wave alone, it would have taken Hitachi and the client at least three years to complete this project. With Blueprint, they were able to conclude the switch in 3 month’s time, slashing the project timeline by 92%.
Having a trusted Microsoft partner and systems integrator who had experience and valued Blueprint so highly also made this project possible. Hitachi’s experience using Blueprint to migrate RPA estates only contributed to the accelerated timeline and successful delivery of the migration.
Blueprint’s Customer Experience team also served a vital purpose, training and enabling the client’s citizen developers so quickly to migrate bots, while remaining ever-accessible and agile to jump in and address any questions or issues that arose to keep the project moving forward with momentum.
Blueprint’s product team additionally helped further accelerate this migration. A new release of the Blueprint platform included several enhancements that Hitachi recommended and provided feedback on. For example, the amount of to-do’s developers had to address in Power Automate once the bots had been mapped over was reduced by nearly 80% with the product update, significantly decreasing the migration effort even more and facilitating an even simpler and quicker migration.
Using Blueprint’s RPA Analytics solution, 10% of the first wave of the client’s bots were also decommissioned to optimize the resiliency of their RPA estate and save licensing costs after moving to Power Automate.
“Not only were we able to immediately get a profound understanding of our client’s bots by using Blueprint’s RPA Analytics Dashboards,” explains Panek, “But we were also able to identify and retire some overly complex automations and even duplicates to shave more time of the migration timeline and save on licensing costs once we were up and running in Power Automate.”
- Don Panek, Director, Rapid Solution Development, Hitachi Solutions
Since moving to Microsoft Power Automate, the client has also reduced their automation total cost of ownership by a staggering 40%—savings which are predominantly attributed to Microsoft’s significantly lower pricing.
Moving forward, both Hitachi and their client plan on using Blueprint to migrate the remaining 3,500 bots in their estate off UiPath and onto Microsoft Power Automate, while also looking for more bot retirement opportunities to realize additional significant cost savings.
For More Information
About Hitachi Solutions
About RPA Migration Services: Migrate & Modernize with Power Automate
