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RPA bubble will burst in the BPM Market
RPA bubble will burst in the BPM Market

June 19, 2020

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RPA is an overhyped word linked with futuristic robotics and AI, whereas, in practical life, all it does is mimic human actions on a screen. We are yet to see a broad use-case where RPA actually makes a difference in your business automation. It is consultant driven, breaks when there’s a small change in UI and it is really expensive. I don’t get it why RPA is so overhyped by its vendors and marketers. It is a bubble of the BPM market that will soon burst.

What’s wrong with the approach of using RPA?

There are big enterprises who moved to RPA to extend their Legacy System. They were convinced that their current tech stack is outdated and need to update it with RPA. It is being used as a method of “Band-Aid Fix” to revamp the legacy system for modern challenges. RPA was perceived as cost-saving and less risky as it required almost no change in the existing system. This implies that RPA is a short term solution for these businesses. If a business wants to grow and achieve stability in its growth, it will have to look for a long term solution. When businesses use RPA to automate a bunch of tasks, they are masking the underlying problems with their processes as RPA tries to cover their legacy systems. 

For example, A company is running its invoice process with a manual infrastructure or old legacy system, where APIs are not integrated with the solution. If this company decides to automate and start training an RPA solution to do their tasks, it won’t be innovative and effective for the long term. They are masking the real problem by using RPA. Instead of thinking in a broader perspective and expanding their technology, they are asking a tool to repeat what they have been doing for years.

Top-level authorities focus on throwing solutions and technology to the problems that are faced by executives. They should focus on identifying core process-related problems and the solutions to the same. They need to focus on the shifting demands of the new workforce and target markets instead of throwing tech at employees.

Now people are starting to realize the real issue against the original promise. People have found out that:

RPA does not inspire people to solve fundamental problems with a broader perspective of technology. It inspires people to automate menial tasks.

RPA does not lead to a digital transformation of your organization. It just digitalizes one transaction of one process.

 

Limitations of the overpromised RPA 

We wanted to understand what were the limitations of RPA that does not allow it to make up to the promise. We found out the following:

  1. It breaks with little UI changes 

As mentioned in the initial paragraph of the blog, RPA breaks when UI changes even a little bite. It takes a lot of effort and time to set up an RPA bot for your system. If a company is doing it on a large scale, it becomes difficult to set it up in the first place. Just in case you go through all the pain of setting it up, it would totally collapse with a simple change in UI. You would have to reset the whole automation again for that UI change. Robots need to be trained often on any business level changes. This begins a never-ending long and complex implementation cycle.

“Because RPA usually interacts with user interfaces, even minor changes to those interfaces may lead to a broken process. After all, robots can’t adjust their behavior the same way a human would.” – Keith Murphy, Tech Enablement Specialist

  1. It is costly

One of the biggest downsides of RPA is expensive. Businesses especially SMEs and startups are generally not ready to pay such an amount for automating a few tasks. Other than it being a tedious task to set up, the setup cost limits RPA from being a useful product. Along with the set-up cost, the maintenance cost is too high as well.

  1. Requires Structured format

Businesses need to have structured data to implement RPA. Businesses force the employees to adapt to the system instead of building a system that compliments the business. If we extend the earlier example of creating invoices, there are possibilities that suppliers or service providers can create invoices in different formats.

  1. Limited Use Cases 

Every ad or promotion of RPA that you will see will probably give you the same example on how RPAs can mimic human actions. Software robots can open an email, open attachments, complete forms, extract data, and perform tasks like humans. That’s what an RPA does. We have not witnessed a large scale implementation of RPA for use-cases beyond creating invoices and procurement processes.

  1. It is a consultant driven solution

RPA products are not easy to use. It is complex and you need a high amount of expertise to set one up. The total cost of ownership of an RPA includes a bug cost of implementation services. Either you have to hire an in-house RPA expert or work with a consultant agency. It is not an easy plug and play solution. Imagine a product so complex, there’s a whole industry for making it work. Also, this is not just a one-time thing. As mentioned earlier, you will have to incur this cost of consultation every time you change the process.

If RPA is the buzzword and a bubble that will soon burst in the BPM market, what’s next?

 


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Akashkotadia

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