Automation Anywhere and UiPath are valued at 2.5-3 billion, raising funds from Sequoia, SoftBank and others. My understanding from their training videos is that their software helps people automate button click and typing tasks. For example - automatically fill a webform using entries from a CSV. Defining this workflow takes about 1 hour. Think selenium js framework performing UI tests. Is this such a huge deal for companies? I'm unable to wrap my head around what could be the value. Case studies are full of jargon and don't state what was actually done. Any of you seen RPA in action at your companies? What's a real example?
Amazon hired armies of temps to copy info from XML files into a form that could be fed into their databases. They still pay vendors hundreds of thousands of dollars to manipulate metadata from one form to another that’s easily ingestible.
I see!!
Why not hire a couple of engineers to automate this workflow if this is a recurring expense. Would Amazon pay for the services offered by these RPA companies - UIPath or Automation Anywhere?
In Microsoft we thought of using RPA for our sales operations. We have a mish mash of applications from Marketo to Dynamics. It’s so much easier to slap together a solution to copy paste data between the systems in the front end rather than go into the back end muck of these systems and wait for dev resources in MSIT.
Yep new software implementations take months to years at large enterprises. Simpler, faster and cheaper to “slap some code” into middleware. And often SDEs are in one org while ops is in another, both with their own goals and agendas with no incentive to collaborate on this problem. So easier for ops to go external to solve (RPAs). Same situation with martech or BI teams bypassing IT (“shadow IT”).
Yes. Look at operational cost centers that employ hundreds of people. Look at off-shored jobs. RPA could eliminate many of those jobs off the books completely. Lots of cost savings, efficiency, and risk control.
Can you give at least one real example? Are people sitting and copy pasting data from CSVs today?
Emails have excel attachments showing trade executions for the day. From that csv, you must send confirmations to clients. Say it’s 10,000 trade confirmations across 100 clients. How many people do you need to do that? Is that more than the cost of 1 RPA bot. Yes.