RPA Enthusiasts: Take Note - Dan Ternes CTO Blue Prism Advises

While Dan Ternes, CTO, APJ, Blue Prism is an expert on RPA and he works to provide automation solutions for Blue Prism clients, he is also transparent enough to caution his clients about the challenges they may encounter along their RPA journey. Here, he discusses some of these concerns with us.

How extensive is Blue Prism's presence in India? 
The first large scale RPA deployments in India were Blue Prism Global Inhouse Centres (GIC)/Global Capability Centers(GCC)of  multinational customers. Today, Blue Prism has a dominant market position amongst the Indian GIC/GCC community. The GCC community is by far the largest adopter of Blue Prism powered scale, strategic automation deployments in India. Over the last 18 months, Blue Prism has invested in building up our local India focused resources.  Blue Prism India now has all of our global field operations functions (e.g. Customer Support, Professional Services, Customer Success, Alliances, Academic/Education Alliances, Sales & Marketing) in India and continues to rapidly expand those teams.  We have recently launched an Indian GCC Community to serve and facilitate intelligent automation best practice sharing and innovation amongst this community. We are now rolling out an Indian Developer Community to nurture and grow    the large Indian Blue Prism Developer community.
How efficient is cloud deployment of RPA as compared to the on-premise RPA deployment? 
Since theoretically on-premise data centres have access to the same hardware, software and expertise as the Cloud IaaS vendors, you could assume that there would be little difference between the efficiency of deployments in one environment compared to the other.
However, in practice, we’ve certainly seen customers who’ve migrated to a Blue Prism environment from on-premise to the Cloud and immediately reaped substantial cost savings and efficiency improvements. In one such example, a major financial services institution found that their move to the Cloud resulted in a 21% decrease in run costs along with a 22% increase in performance and efficiency.

What are the challenges faced in RPA deployment and integration in emerging market economies and how do you strategise to tackle those challenges? 
Many organisations seem to be seduced by the apparent simplicity of RPA. Certainly, if the intent is to merely use RPA in a limited capacity to solve only a small number of tactical problems for the organisation, then indeed the implementation will be relatively simple, success will be largely guaranteed and payback will be rapidly secured. However, most organisations have a more strategic vision for their adoption of RPA. They see digital workers as core to their ongoing operations; they see digital workers deployed across numerous LOBs handling hundreds of separate processes from the mundane to the mission-critical; and they see human resources and digital resources collaborating to undertake the business of the organisation. And at that scale, getting RPA right is difficult.
This difficulty comes in two forms: a technology form and a methodology form. To the first, the issue is helping organisations to understand which software capabilities make the largest contributions to success at scale and impressing upon them the need to properly evaluate these capabilities. RPA is still relatively nascent and most organisations do not have personnel with sufficient RPA experience to understand where the pitfalls lie, especially since those pitfalls aren’t apparent on Day 1, but rather on, say, Day 301. Some of these issues include (a) change management insofar as ongoing modifications to legacy applications necessitate “retraining” of digital workers, (b) maintaining an appropriate segregation of duties across multiple LOBs whilst nevertheless facilitating sharing and collaboration, (c) non-repudiation and the need for a forensic-level audit of interactions across the RPA platform, and (d) the need for non-technical, subject matter experts to build out their processes without sacrificing IT control and governance.
To the second, the issue is helping organisations to adopt a proper operating model for RPA adoption and having them understand the organisational, cultural and governance impacts of RPA at scale.  These are the sort of factors that will act as roadblocks to increased adoption and ongoing success.
For Blue Prism’s part, our longevity in this space coupled with our experiences with large-scale enterprise RPA adoption have given us the opportunity to build out our Robotic Operating Model methodology and programs such as our Success Accelerator which together act as a blueprint for favourable outcomes. And critically, having all global field operations functions available on-the-ground in India means that we can act in concert with our local partners and customers to underwrite the success of their implementations.

This difficulty comes in two forms: a technology form and a methodology form -

To the first, the issue is helping organisations to understand which software capabilities make the largest contributions to success at scale and impressing upon them the need to properly evaluate these capabilities. RPA is still relatively nascent and most organisations do not have personnel with sufficient RPA experience to understand where the pitfalls lie, especially since those pitfalls aren’t apparent on Day 1, but rather on, say, Day 301.

Some of these issues include (a) change management insofar as ongoing modifications to legacy applications necessitate “retraining” of digital workers, (b) maintaining an appropriate segregation of duties across multiple LOBs whilst nevertheless facilitating sharing and collaboration, (c) non-repudiation and the need for a forensic-level audit of interactions across the RPA platform, and (d) the need for non-technical, subject matter experts to build out their processes without sacrificing IT control and governance. To the second, the issue is helping organisations to adopt a proper operating model for RPA adoption and having them understand the organisational, cultural and governance impacts of RPA at scale.  These are the sort of factors that will act as roadblocks to increased adoption and ongoing success.

What do you foresee as the potential for RPA deployment in India and which industrial sectors do you think would be the most benefited from it? 
Indian GCCs will continue to be the fastest and largest adopters of Blue Prism intelligent automation.  Many have achieved exceptional early results and are now scaling their BP deployments and leveraging Blue Prism’s connected-RPA  capabilities to apply innovations in AI to their process automation initiatives. After GCCs, the Indian Professional Services e.g.
IT Services organisations have the highest potential to benefit from Blue Prism’s connected-RPA.  Again, Blue Prism is uniquely positioned for these large scale organisations with extremely demanding security and audit/compliance requirements. The Indian BFSI will certainly be a high potential sector for intelligent automation but is currently lagging NA & Europe on large scale, enterprise grade connected-RPA deployments. We anticipate that the Indian BFSI and Manufacturing sectors will rapidly ‘catch up’ and we look forward to working with these sectors on world class ‘strategic’ intelligent automation deployments in the near future.