Businesses across all industries are increasingly pumping their money into RPA. Industry leaders predict that by 2027 the market will reach $11 billion, growing at a CAGR of 34% from 2020 to 2027. Whether you’re just starting the RPA journey or investing more, identifying the right processes for automation is critical to driving your RPA project to success while achieving maximum return on investment.
How much does RPA cost?
It’s a common notion that the cost of RPA highly depends on the number of bots implemented. According to Deloitte, enterprises pay anywhere between $5000 and $15,000 to get one bot up and running. So, for an enterprise implementing about 500 bots, the cost could run up to $7.5 million.
However, HFS Research notes that bot licensing accounts for 25-30% of RPA implementation cost. 75% of the cost is a combination of yearly license renewal fees, cost of training and hiring subject matter experts, process discovery consultation costs, and expensive bot fixes that reduce RPA returns.
Hiring consultants for analyzing how your business processes work and prioritizing processes for automation is expensive and time-consuming. When you hire consultants from top-notch consulting firms, you end up spending as much as $500 per hour. The manual process discovery itself could take a few weeks or even months. And because this process involves several interviews and shadowing of users, it reduces employee productivity and delays the time to reap actual results.
Automating inefficient processes is another cost drainer. Automating broken processes will only maximize inefficiencies – garbage in, garbage out.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Bill Gates
When you don’t understand how your processes really work, you get caught in costs that increase RPA implementation expense as you have to keep reworking the process and underlying RPA bots.
Save 40% cost on RPA projects with SurfaceAI
SurfaceAI is a scalable solution that can quickly collect “AS-IS” processes from users’ actions on their desktops to identify processes with automation potential. It gives you the ability to apply custom Taxonomy or Process Hierarchy to map the processes for standardization and automation. Since the processes are auto-annotated and come as process maps, it is easy to auto-generate RPA scripts that can be run on market-leading RPA tools.
SurfaceAI eliminates the guesswork associated with prioritizing processes and helps to achieve the shortest path to automation. It eliminates the delays and human-induced errors that come with traditional discovery methods while uncovering process variations that are not caught by human eyes. It monitors every action of the user including keystrokes, mouse selections, and applications used, saving all the time and effort spent on expensive consultants. Process discovery is not limited to be just the first step of the automation process. Rather, it should be a continuous exercise to find new automation opportunities and get the best ROI from your RPA initiative. SurfaceAI has helped customers save 40% of their RPA costs through effective process discovery. Want to see how much we can save for your organization? Contact us today.