RPA Managed Services: Maintain and Control Your Virtual Workforces
Regardless the size of your company, everyone starts their RPA journey in good hope with optimistic spirits. After a successful first pilot, the added value is indisputably clear. A strategic program to automate the biggest administrative pains has lift off. There is a clear senior management buy-in, resources are allocated and close collaboration with IT is foreseen. Not long after the pilot, multiple RPA initiatives are triggered across the organization and virtual workforces are being used to augment the human capacity. The orchestration tool is smoothly configured and IT gives the RPA-environment back to business when the infrastructure has been set up. The journey has finally begun. After some time, various stable running processes have been put into production and are working properly as designed.
Does this ideal scenario sounds familiar and as music to your ears?
Unfortunately, the reality is sometimes far from different.
1. Every business process has its own exceptions. Some exceptions were foreseen during development, some were not. After a few successful runs the bot stops working and by the time the business discovers there is an issue, a large backlog is already waiting. All those (sometimes business critical) cases might have a strict deadline. Should the end users really start doing this manually again? Who can pick this up and fix this? Who knows the automation tool? Who knows the particular process and who knows the target applications? Often nobody.
2. Occasionally the target application of the RPA-bot is updated, changed or an extra field is added due to a modification in the procedure. These unexpected changes are often not clearly communicated or prepared and are rapidly executed because of the urge of time. The automated flow stops and the bot stops working. Does the business have time to execute the time-consuming process manually again? Probably not.
3. Within the IT-department there is often no developer available and there is a lack of technical knowledge within the business. If there is a knowledgeable RPA-developer his planning is most often full. Should he/she really drop his/her current development tasks and jeopardize his/her own deadline? Low-code does not mean there is no debugging needed to track the error or to find the cause of the non-successful run of the bot. Is this something the business is able to do?
4. Often there is an internal RPA team part of a CoE (augmented with external resources) that is fully focused on the delivery of new automated processes. Fast delivery and high ROIs in the first years, that is the sweet spot of RPA. However, suddenly the strategy is shifting and budgets are shrinking. There is more work to be done with less resources. Who from the RPA team will jump in and help business with their exceptions and bot errors?
To avoid similar situations we, at RoboRana, have implemented a flexible and cost-effective managed service offering ready to support your needs. Our service desk has one mission: releasing the burden of maintaining and controlling a virtual RPA workforce.
Our customers can log their issues and ask for support through our dedicated service desk. We have the knowledge of your RPA tool and preferable we have all documentation about your processes and target applications at hand. Bots are restarted, blockades are resolved and the process is resumed according to the priority determined by our customer. Next to blocking incidents our service desk offers the possibility to request minor changes to an existing process. These changes are first estimated in consultation and after approval, our consultants are planned according to your agenda! Last but not least we can also monitor your processes and bots. If a robot fails, our service desk is automatically notified so that we can intervene and take the necessary actions to restart the robot.
As the result of our managed services, IT and Business can sleep on both ears. IT is not flooded with issues and questions for which they do not have the right resource or knowledge in house and business is assured that their processes will run continuously. And if something unexpected happens, people with the correct knowledge and information are available to help and make sure the business operations doesn’t get delayed.
Our packages
We offer our managed services in different packs with various features. Every organization finds a model that suits the type of challenge. Do you just want to file non-urgent and urgent requests together with small changes, there is the option of our Bronze pack. If there is a need for tight deadlines and the bot are automating business critical processes, it is important to have priority-based pricing with commitment on reaction and resolution times. Our Silver and Golden packs take into account several SLA’s and can be additionally tailored to your needs. There is a fixed monthly fee but for this, we guarantee the availability of our service desk staff members.
Does your organization feel the pain of an up and running virtual workforce? Or is your internal RPA maintenance shifting towards an outsourcing strategy?
Reach out and together we look for the ideal service desk package tailored to your needs. Our mission is supporting business and relieving the work of IT. We maximize the performance of the bots in production, optimize the use of licenses and create time for the organization to invest in the development of new processes.
Besides providing supporting hands, we can also offer training sessions to increase the robot quality. Best practices, readability of the workflow and exception handling are key elements in a robust design and taking these into account will dramatically decrease the need for robot maintenance.
We are here to help! 🐸
