Digital Transformation Journey

Do you know why vast majority of people or organizations invest in RPA projects? Actually no one has got the exact answer to this question. But mostly people / organizations invest in RPA projects for cost savings. As such taking the call whether to go-ahead and use the BOT or not is return on investment or ROI. And a positive ROI means that the cost of deploying the BOT was recovered in the saving that BOT has generated. The issue in measuring ROI is that when we are candid with ourselves, the process of calculating ROI’s is massively faulty.  But no worry, let's try to accurately model all the costs and benefits associated with an RPA solution. One thing we should always remember that accuracy of the ROI outcome is totally dependent upon the correctness of our inputs and our expectations.  A slight slippage here & there means, the calculated ROI is often meaningless. Sometimes this factual error is accidental, but other times it is quite intentional. While BOT's often ha...

Don't you think this is very surprising that even after lots of planning, financial analysis & smart investments, majority of organizations miss to achieve the BOT return on investment (ROI). Is this due to a lack of understanding, a lack of insight or a lack of oversight? Personally, I think these are not the true drivers of failure, rather nearly all these failures generate stem from unreasonable expectations. If you closely watch, you will find that most of the business leaders are looking for different ways & means to leaning out their organization, and when a technology like robotics process automation comes along, promising to provide immediate benefits, for little cost, and little effort, they excitedly want to believe those promises. They buy into often crazily optimistic cost or benefits models, in the hope that those benefits will be realized. But with slight slippage here and there, investments in BOT fail to deliver the expected ROI.  If you take a deep dive, yo...

Thomas A Edison said very rightly that “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” You must be wondering Why do so many organizations fail to succeed with RPA? Given the enormous promise of intelligent automation, and its inevitability, why does so many RPA projects fail? Business Leaders are increasingly turning RPA to deliver value to Clients / stakeholders and meet the new organizational imperative to do right. But you will be surprised to know that 30 to 50 percent of early enterprise RPA projects fail. The market for the technology is projected to grow around 31% by 2025, and it’s easy to see why. But nearly half of initiatives fall short of delivering benefits because executives haven’t laid the right groundwork. Most of them design BOT's in the vacuum of business process without actually addressing the complexities of the technology, so majority of them end up with BOT's that do little to solve the planned challenges. To make sense of...

Recently while going through some of the articles on investing and ownership of BOT, came through an interesting analysis of PET analogy of BOT done by Surdak. To reinforce his pet analogy, he selected several of the types of BOTs he has seen companies deploy in the real world and came up with the analogous. The following BOT categories are typical of those found in the Automation industry today: Turtle BOT’s or TOT’s: This is a BOT that allows an organization to claim that they are using BOT technology, but only just.  Nearly all Proofs of Concept (POCs) or Proofs of Value (POVs) are TOT’s.  They nearly always work because their functionality is so limited, your expectations of them are so small, and the situation in which they are used is almost never an adequate approximation of reality. Crab BOT’s or CROT’s: A CROT is a TOT that sits in its own little house and doesn’t do much.  Hence a CROT is a TOT that runs on a laptop.  A Proof of Concept is likely a CROT....

Whenever someone start talking about robotics process automation. The first thing that comes to our mind is what is BOT? When you look back in the past 5 to 6 years, you will find that around late 2014 & early 2015 Robotic Process Automation (RPA), have roared onto the business world. Today almost every business / organization has deployed or somewhere in the middle of deploying it to drive efficiency and have better ROI from the business process. Robotics process automation and its older smarter cousin Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm, promising cheap, fast & good processes in place leading to quick / high ROI. But the question that came to our mind in beginning while the RPA conversation started remaining un-answered......what is BOT or what is RPA? The simplest explanation that comes to my mind is that BOT is a software that runs the software.  RPA is software that simulates the actions that humans make in operating other software. In this way they ...