Major Oil and Gas Technology Provider Migrates Entire RPA Estate to Microsoft Power Automate with Blueprint in 3 Months, Realizing Massive Savings in Migration Costs, Licensing Fees, and Infrastructure Expenses

About the Client

This Fortune-500 customer is a leader in the oil and gas industry. With a storied history and recognition globally, this organization provides technology and field services in the oil and gas vertical and is widely considered the largest provider in its industry by both size and revenue.

Having been an early adopter of RPA (robotic process automation), the client was eager to migrate their estate from their complex and expensive legacy RPA tool to Microsoft Power Automate. Their main objectives were to reduce the inflated Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for automation and better leverage the existing investments they had made with Microsoft solutions.

“Blueprint not only delivered significant savings for the migration itself, but getting our entire RPA estate onto Microsoft Power Automate so quickly and seamlessly has enabled us to really reduce our automation costs in terms of licensing and infrastructure. The benefits we’re seeing have been immediate and truly impactful.”
- Vice President, Digital Transformation, Major Oil & Gas Technology Provider

Challenges

This client was in a position where their contract with their legacy RPA tool that they started their automation journey with was winding down and coming up for renewal.

Confronted with costs that had steadily increased and become inflated, this client viewed their terminating contract as an opportunity to investigate next-generation intelligent automation platforms in an effort to reduce costs and realize scale.    

Primarily, they wanted to reduce their RPA licensing costs, which had spiralled out of control, and their incredibly heavy infrastructure costs which were needed to keep their automation practice running.

They already had sizeable investments with other Microsoft products, so naturally, Power Automate was the first intelligent automation platform they explored. They quickly realized they could significantly reduce RPA’s total cost of ownership from both a licensing and infrastructure perspective by switching to Power Automate. In addition, consolidating their automation practice under Microsoft would enable them to leverage their current Microsoft infrastructure, accelerate automation with the other Microsoft products they already used such as Office 365, and reduce the complexity of automation so citizen developers could automate low-hanging fruit to promote scale and fuel more cost savings.

Their biggest challenge was finding a way to migrate their RPA estate to Microsoft Power Automate quickly, securely, and without having to make a sizeable investment that would diminish their business case that was predominantly built on cost savings. Their VP of Digital Transformation explains,

 “The decision to switch to Power Automate was the easy part. We quickly saw how much we could be saving in terms of licensing and infrastructure costs, not to mention the advantages we would gain from automating processes that interacted with all the Microsoft products we already had implemented. The hard part was figuring out how to migrate without wasting all those possible returns and benefits on the resources we would need to rebuild our entire portfolio of automations in Power Automate." 

The client entertained the possibility of executing the migration to Microsoft Power Automate manually where each automation would need to be understood and then rebuilt in Power Automate, however, it quickly became apparent that they couldn’t support the project timeline or the resources they would need.

A manual migration would have demanded parallel runs (maintaining two RPA platforms until the migration was complete) and all the technical resources to recode each automated process while introducing risk with human intervention. What they really needed, was a solution that could migrate their RPA estate automatically.

Solution

This major leader in oil and gas technology services reached out to Blueprint to see how we could help them migrate their RPA estate onto Microsoft Power Automate in a reasonable timeline while staying in budget according to the business case they had created.

“We were aware that Blueprint had an RPA migration solution. There aren’t a lot of options in the automation space when it comes to migration, so Blueprint was mentioned in a few conversations we had with analysts, consultants, and our external service integrator. We weren’t sure what to expect but they agreed to migrate a couple of automations we provided them with live in a demo. The results were extraordinary and we knew we had found the RPA migration solution that would unlock our move to Power Automate."

- Vice President, Digital Transformation, Major Oil & Gas Technology Provider

The first step in establishing the relationship to migrate their automation estate to Microsoft Power Automate was to demo how Blueprint’s RPA migration solution actually works live. The client provided Blueprint with three automation files that were ingested into the migration software, demonstrating the rich analytics the platform provided like how much of each automation was compatible with Microsoft Power Automate without any human intervention. This process also showed where each automation could be optimized to reduce potential maintenance risks in the future.

The client quickly realized how much time and resources they would save in migrating their estate with Blueprint.

Blueprint worked closely with the client’s global service integrator, onboarding them quickly to migrate their entire automation estate in a quarter of the time it would have taken them to do so manually.

Outcomes

Blueprint and the global service integrator the client partnered with migrated 70 automations totalling over 200,000 actions within a 3-month time frame while reducing the manual effort required to migrate by 50%. The same migration would have taken close to two years to complete manually, and that’s being conservative.

In terms of the cost savings the client was able to realize, Blueprint saved the client 60% of the resources they would have needed to perform the migration with their global service integrator manually. Because of the cost reduction Microsoft Power Automate delivers, the client has been able to reduce their licensing fees by 30% and their infrastructure costs by a whopping 70%.

"The migration itself was quick and seamless. Blueprint’s ability to ingest our automations from our legacy RPA tool and automatically convert around 95% of each automation into Power Automate really accelerated and simplified the process beyond anything we expected. Their RPA migration solution is really what enabled us to realize the benefits and cost savings we projected that first convinced us to move to Power Automate, making the whole project an overwhelming success."

- Vice President, Digital Transformation, Major Oil & Gas Technology Provider

Even though the migration project to Microsoft Power Automate has concluded, the client plans to continue using Blueprint for its RPA Analytics solution well into the future. They’re currently using Blueprint to track and monitor the health of their automations such as complexity so it doesn’t get out of control and pose future risks of outages, redundancies, and where processes can be refactored for greater resiliency and efficiencies.