Robotic process automation (RPA) has been propelled into the spotlight as organisations accelerate their digital transformation journeys under the Covid-19 lash.
The premise for RPA is simple and compelling: using technology to automate mundane and repetitive tasks ensures they are carried out consistently; and human staff can be freed up to do more creative and interesting work.
However, the reality on the ground for many organisations hasn’t met those expectations, says Graham Fry, MD of SpacePencil.
“They have found that cost and complexity always go together – and RPA projects have tended to be pretty complex, with resulting high costs that have made automation simply unaffordable for many tasks.”
Apart from licencing costs, partners and end user organisations often have to make an investment in training top-end resources to use complicated methodologies, with all the risks that go along with that, he says.
“We looked at the market and realised there was space for an affordable and easy-to-use tool, so we developed Roboteur from the bottom up.”
In fact, SpacePencil developed Roboteur because the company wanted to implement its own RPA project and realised it would be cheaper to develop its own tool than buy into an existing one.
“We are all developers so we know what is needed. We built something that is simple and doesn’t require an organisation to dedicate its most expensive resources to deploying.”
He hastens to add that some projects do need a full platform solution with accompanying methodology and skills requirement. But many don’t and Roboteur is designed to fill this gap.
“An important part of Roboteur’s attraction is that organisations can choose their own methodology, and they can deploy robots that start with the simplest tasks right up to more complex processes.”
“We are the disrupters in this market,” says Brian Litte, chief operating officer of SpacePencil. “We give our resellers the opportunity to enter the RPA market without having to make massive investments; and they can sell solutions for tasks that were previously not even on the radar because the cost was too high.
“A lot of partners are signing up to Roboteur to address opportunities they have already walked away from – because now they have a tool that cost-effectively addresses those projects.”
Because it opens up a previously-unattended market, Little says Roboteur doesn’t actually compete directly with other RPA offering on the market. “What we are doing instead is opening up a new area of automation that has not been feasible to address before now.”
The tool can scale, Fry adds, but is seeing most interest is the areas that have been neglected until now.
“There is no discernible competition at this level of the market: people have been ignoring it because RPA was typically unaffordable for these projects.”
Roboteur uses a building block concept. Little explains: “Each utility block works exactly the same as every other block, so there is not much learning required. And, just like building blocks, no matter how many devices you have, they all just plug together.”
The blocks start out addressing the simplest functions, and are then pushed together to create more complex processes.
Lead developer Barry Buck adds that the building block approach makes it possible for business analysts to be more involved in the RPA design, ensuring the processes are closely aligned to the business requirements.
“Customers want to be able to execute their vision, and the technology must allow for that.
“Programming really comes down to what the developer of business analyst has in their head. Giving them an interface where they can drag and drop functions means they can do a lot more.
“I have put all of my knowledge of machines and coding into Roboteur and now other people can build things that are beyond my own imagination.”
He reiterates the fact that cost is typically the biggest inhibitor for RPA. “We have one customer who wants to roll out a single process to hundreds of sites. Until now the cost has been prohibitive.
“That is the market we are opening up.”
What is RPA?
Robotic process automation (RPA) is essentially an app that performs a particular job.
“A robot (or bot) is an app that you install on a computer and it runs one job at a time,” explains Barry Buck, lead developer at SpacePencil.
“The big benefit is that it can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It can run one job all the time, or you can split its time between multiple jobs – it’s up to you what your bot does.”
The big benefit of RPA is that it allows organisations to automate mundane and repetitive jobs that are usually performed by humans.
“You’d look at bringing in a bot to do some of the things that people currently perform that aren’t really worth taking up the human’s time.
“For instance, doing a general ledger balance can be massively time-consuming and it gets expensive to have a person performing that task every day. Automating it frees up the person, and you know the job will be done correctly and consistently every time.”
The possibilities are almost limitless, Buck adds.
Business governance can be automated, as can many of the functions performed by human resources staff.
“The ultimate purpose of RPA is to free up valuable resources and improve the quality of work.”
While automating tasks is the main benefit that an RPA tool like Roboteur offers, it can also be used to write bespoke software solutions, Buck adds.
“All companies, from SMEs to enterprises, have problems that need customised software solutions. Bringing in developers is expensive and time-consuming – and often fails.
“RPA, however, is another level of programming where the development cycle is a lot quicker, and there are a lot of prepackaged functions that can be used.”
These solutions could even be developed by less highly-skilled developers, solving the business problem quickly and at a lower cost than normal, Buck says.
“It’s high-level programming, where the developer – or even the business analyst – can design a process via an easy-to-use visual interface.
“We think it’s a new development paradigm.”
Roboteur was developed as the automation arm of Zero One, SpacePencil’s own home-grown development platform.
Learn more on www.spacepencil.co.uk or contact management@spacepencil.co.uk to arrange a demo