3 Secrets to Successful Scale with RPA

The enticing promise of increased productivity decreased costs, and higher quality are compelling arguments for implementing automation at scale. And nearly every forward-thinking company in the world is on this journey. Yet, many find themselves frustrated with taking too long to get started or stuck at a small scale.

Successfully implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) requires something better than fundamental scripting tools and incremental thinking. True RPA technology allows you to start simply and grow in quantity and sophistication at the organization’s desired pace. Whether that means hundreds or thousands of bots, the bottleneck should never be the tools or processes being automated.

To realize the real-world benefits of intelligent automation, you need three key ingredients:

• Agility — to quickly build new bots and deploy them
• Sufficient infrastructure — to build and manage all the bots you’ll need
• Integration options — to allow for progressive sophistication over time

Many RPA tools promise much but deliver disappointment when going beyond simple tasks. They lack the intelligence and flexibility to grow with your business.

That’s why when choosing the right RPA tool for your business needs, it’s important to look beyond naïve pilot tests. You want to select an RPA technology that works well with your existing back- and front-office infrastructures.

It’s just as vital to select an intelligent automation company that offers hands-on service to help you identify opportunities and implement scaling efforts.

At Automation Anywhere, we pride ourselves on helping customers quickly realize optimal results through our A+ Customer Success Ecosystem. But don’t take our word for it — read these actual customer experiences.

Agility

Cooperative Dutch pension fund service provider PGGM manages pension assets worth more than $230 billion. At the start of the company’s RPA pilot program, an external consultant initially introduced another RPA tool to replace mundane, manual tasks. However, PGGM found the exercise expensive and too slow to keep up with its rapid pace of change.

After implementing Automation Anywhere Enterprise, PGGM found they could build their own RPA bots quickly — less than two weeks from start to finish.

“It's a very flexible tool, which makes it easy to automate in a continuously changing environment,” says Sander van Romondt, a PGGM RPA developer. “We can serve our business departments very fast.”

Fellow RPA Developer Martin Riehl agrees. “We were able to build our first bot within two weeks. I don’t think that’s something we could have accomplished without Automation Anywhere’s software. It really speaks to the quality.”

Sufficient infrastructure

Founded in 1902, Japan-based Dai-ichi Life Insurance has been expanding its overseas operations to provide a consistent level of service. After piloting and comparing several RPA products in an effort to improve business operations, Dai-ichi Life chose Automation Anywhere for its server functionality and ease of use — and its ability to meet the company’s future large-scale deployment needs.

“We are saving 132,000 hours annually by implementing RPA to perform 460 tasks across the company,” says Kei Maedomari, life insurance manager in the company’s business process planning department.

That saving is the result of 460 bots across 36 departments. The company plans to automate 3,000 more tasks and increase the savings to 450,000 hours by the end of its 2020 fiscal year.

Integration

An RPA program shouldn’t need to rip and replace infrastructure. No industry knows this better than banking.

That’s why when a multinational investment bank and financial services company based in New York City needed help managing its bot lifecycle while transitioning from basic RPA to intelligent automation, it chose to stick with Automation Anywhere.

Our Bot Insight analytics platform provided the insight the firm needed into the role of each of its software bots, including visibility into data in transit and at rest. “Without Bot Insight, we’d lack the transparency we required to meet compliance mandates from around the world,” explains the bank’s executive director.

The results speak for themselves: More than 1,000 bots were deployed into production, saving the firm 92% of the time it previously took to add new accounts to the IT system.

The bottom line: Scale is key

If there’s one common theme across all three of these customer stories, it’s how implementing bots at scale requires more than just simplistic RPA tools. Effective use of intelligent automation requires mature, capable RPA technology with the infrastructure and agility to capitalize on emerging opportunities to automate new tasks.