Overcoming the 4 Most Common Roadblocks to Automation Success

By year 3 it’s time to reassess the value of your RPA program and determine how to overcome the roadblocks to automation success. Early on, the market overpromised and underdelivered causing many companies to find themselves at an Automation Crossroad. The early wins have all been automated, and new technology would be needed to expand the program.  

This is a moment where many RPA programs stall and leadership finds themselves asking,  
“Did we get what we paid for?”  
And even more importantly, “Where do we go from here?” 

At this Automation Crossroad you may choose to double down and reignite your RPA program as AI-Powered Intelligent Automation with new tools and enthusiasm. Or you may choose to just keep what’s working and focus on reducing the total cost of ownership for your current automations. Whichever way you go WonderBotz has a roadmap to help you. Check out our Automation Crossroads Roadmap here. 

In the meanwhile, it can be helpful to explore how we got to this point. In this article we will unpack the common roadblocks a maturing automation program faces, and how to solve for each.

4 Most Common Roadblocks to Automation Success

1. Managing Multiple RPA Platforms

How did we get here? Large organizations can end up supporting multiple RPA platforms for many reasons.  A merged or acquired company was using a different RPA platform and brought their system with them. Perhaps different business units began their own automation programs using different tools. In some cases, leadership changes bring different platform preferences, causing innovation to happen on a different platform from legacy automations.

Roadblocks to Automation Success

Managing multiple RPA platforms can cause several challenges: 

• Cost – maintaining licensing, hosting, and infrastructure costs for multiple installations can be expensive.   
• Legacy systems – automations that were built to accommodate legacy systems may be producing value, but not scalable or adaptable to new platform changes. 
• Orchestration – evaluating the efficiency of your automation program as a whole is difficult in siloed platforms that do not communicate well with each other.  

• Migration challenges – migrating automations from one platform is not as easy as drag-and-drop, re-engineering may be required.   

Solutions – Multiple RPA Platform Strategies

One path is to migrate your entire RPA program to one platform, reducing licensing and infrastructure costs. When embarking on a wholesale migration it is a great time to perform an Automation Assessment. We will determine the quality and scalability of your existing code base and if processes are optimized to be performed the Robot Way.

WonderBotz has experience with migrating large automation programs quickly. Our record is migrating 120 automations in under 6 months!  

On the other hand, the old wisdom of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” applies here. It may be most profitable to keep your legacy RPA programs intact and consolidate your hosting and orchestration in one platform. This allows you to maximize efficiency and keep focus on building new automations that will generate more value.  

WonderBotz ARIA Cloud supports multiple RPA platforms and integrates emerging technologies from any vendor into one seamless orchestration. This enables you to maximize your robot efficiency across your entire automation program and integrate new technologies as you scale.

2. Our maintenance cost doesn’t justify the value we are getting

How did we get here? The costs of maintaining your RPA program can easily get out of balance if your program was not built with scale in mind.  The “purchase for future need” strategy for 5-year RPA software license contracts often leaves companies with significant shelf ware. Beyond having been sold more licenses than you ended up needing, there are other cost that can increase over time that can erode the ROI of your automation program.  

These costs might include: 

• The cost of upgrading our On-prem hardware is too expensive. 
• Your program is no longer part of IT shared services and must support its own hosting costs. 
• The program has stopped growing but we have to maintain staff to keep existing automations working. 

Roadblocks to Automation Success

Maintaining an Intelligent RPA program that has stopped growing has its own challenges. Justifying your total cost ownership (TCO) is more than just license renewal, it includes IT and developer costs just to keep the lights on. For companies still using on-prem servers, the costs of upgrading physical equipment can be significant and outstrip the benefit of legacy automations. 

Solutions to get your IT and RPA Maintenance costs under control

By consolidating and outsourcing your IT and maintenance costs to an Managed Service Provider (MSP) you can:

• Capitalize on their economies of scale to secure better rates.  
• Alleviate internal budgeting and manpower constraints. 
• Reduce overhead by letting us maintain your existing automations.

3. Our organization mandated a cloud-first mindset

How did we get here? There are many factors that might justify migrating from an On-Prem installation to a cloud-based RPA program.  If your organization was an early adopter of automation technology your existing hardware is likely out of date and needs upgrading. Many new technologies are only available on cloud platforms. Migrating to a cloud-based infrastructure allows companies to take advantage of increased speed and ease of scalability. 

Roadblocks to Automation Success

There are several considerations when considering a cloud migration: 

• Business disruption – your existing automations need to continue handling critical business functions through this transition.  
• Data loss – histories, audit notes, and update logs all need to transfer with your automations. 
• Procurement – organizing all of the IT Infrastructure pieces needed to migrate your RPA program to the cloud can get mired in procurement cycles if components are purchased independently. 

Solution – WonderBotz provides safe passage to the cloud

WonderBotz understands cloud migration is the path to AI-readiness. It also unlocks an ease of scaling or spinning down segments of your RPA program.  

As experts in cloud migration, we can help you mitigate business disruption risks and optimize your automations to integrate with emerging technologies as you migrate. 

4. We need to add AI next gen technology

How did we get here? The AI revolution is upon us and everyone is asking how you are using AI to improve your business operations. Many companies have received mandates to implement AI technology but struggle to find the correct use case to create meaningful ROI.  

Pressures to implement can come from many sources. Internal business units may be asking for access to online tools wanting ChatGPT functionality. There can be competitive necessity to show that your company is staying current with changing market trends. Customer expectations are rising, you might implement AI Chatbots to deliver a more streamlined customer service experience. 

Roadblocks to Automation Success

For enterprise organizations there are reasons for concern when implementing Gen AI technologies.  

• Cybersecurity – the use of free and open-source cloud ChatGPT functions carries risk of data breaches as your company information goes onto the internet to be processed. Bloomberg Law was among the first to publish the scope of their concerns early this year.  
• Operationalizing AI technology – using an AI Chatbot can create an improved customer experience. By operationalizing AI you make chat data actionable to your digital workers to update customer files, log issues and take action. 
• Your current systems are not compatible – code for older automations and legacy system integrations were not created with AI in mind and in many cases are not compatible with emerging technology.  Running your own instances of AI Technology can take significant processing power that on-prem RPA infrastructures were not built to handle.  

Solutions – How to get your organization AI Ready

AI-powered Intelligent Automation is opening a world of new use cases and opportunities to maximize the efficiency of your robot licenses.  

Our AI Implementation experts are here to brainstorm with you in an AI Jumpstart meeting. We will uncover which additional technologies are needed to propel your RPA program into true Intelligent Automation.

We will help you: 

• Identify your best first use cases, ensuring that your AI Technology investment shows a positive return and strong user adoption. 
• Explore Secure Cloud Infrastructure giving you the flexibility to add the additional processing power needed for AI technology. 
• Keep your company data safe with your own enterprise level ChatGPT solutions. 
• Operationalize your AI technology by building the connectors to transfer the data collected in chat conversations to your digital work force to log and take action from. 

How WonderBotz Can Help

As an RPA License Reseller and Automation Developer for all of the traditional RPA Platforms WonderBotz can advise on a wide range of Intelligent Automation Solutions. Working with customers over the years on legacy systems integrations, adoption of new technology, and AI readiness we have the experience to get over the many roadblocks to automation success that may be impeding your RPA Program.