Robotic process automation can help organisations to streamline processes, cut costs and increase value.
But too often the true value isn’t achieved, because cutting through the complexity of RPA design and implementation is outside of many of their IT partners’ comfort zones.
RPA is a tricky value proposition, explains Brian Little, chief operating officer of Roboteur developer IDI UK. It’s a product that can be sold, but also a product solution and service that needs to be developed, so it straddles the space between the traditional reseller and the development house.
For an RPA project to succeed, it needs to be approached in a holistic manner, with pre-sales consulting including solutions architecture and design architecture; a software development build phase; professional implementation; and ongoing maintenance/services to continue enhancing RPA value and ROI
If any of these steps is missed or bungled, the customer will end up with a less-than-perfect solution, Little points out.
This is why IDI has crafted the reseller programme for its Roboteur RPA tool to ensure customers always get the full RPA value.
Little explains that some resellers are able to provide a full-service offering. Others may be missing or building resources in some areas – but this doesn’t mean they can’t still fulfil their customers automation requirements and increase their own skills progressively along the way.
“For the reseller who identifies a customer opportunity, but has no skills to design, develop, and implement a solution, we can provide those technical professional services on their behalf.
“The customer gets a well-crafted solution, while the reseller makes a margin on the professional Services work, plus exceptional discounts on the annuity-based bots and server licenses.”
At the other end of the spectrum, resellers with architecting, design and build skills can use the Roboteur toolkit to craft the RPA solutions themselves, along with the testing, deployment and maintenance.
Roboteur, as a low code-based RPA toolkit with its cut and paste visual studios, is designed for fast development and implementation of RPA application solutions and known for its relative ease of use compared to most competitive toolkits. It’s an ideal solutions vehicle for the reseller community engaging in RPA for their customers.
“A fully-fledged implementation partner would do the whole project themselves,” says Little. “They still get the discounts on bots and server licenses, and the rest of the revenue streams are theirs with no professional services revenue split back to IDI as the manufacturer.”
Between the novice reseller and the skilled-up implementation partner, there are resellers with varying degrees and areas of expertise. IDI provides the intermediary facilities to assist these partners wanting to move up the value chain, while offering the services they are missing, on their behalf.
“Once we are confident they can build to our Golden Path, they can take up the solutions architecture portion of the project themselves and increase their share of the revenue. And as soon as they have the competencies of design, solutions and build development, they are a self-sufficient partner and move up to the top sphere of fully capable and self-sufficient Solutioning and Implementation Partners.”
Ideally, each partner would strive to offer the full range of services, Little explains. “The reseller should be making 80% of revenue from professional services in RPA. But we are making it attractive via high value discounts for them to sell licences only, reselling our professional services with discounts/markup there as well as they transition their own resources get to full competency and full revenue ownership.”
IDI ensures oversight of every project architecture, design and build, and a 12-month service level agreement (SLA) is mandatory with every bot application solution built with Roboteur where they are the architects and Developers.
The oversight ensures that every bot deployed is working within its Software Application Solution and customer environment as optimally as possible. “This is a good for our brand, and also a guarantee for customers that their RPA solution is working optimally,” Little says. “We don’t want broken bots out there.”
“Important to note that a Roboteur bot is a 24/7 worker and is capable of executing any number of sequential RPA Software solutions and is not bound to a single Automation solution. The criteria for a bot is time based capacity and not the number of executions. Increased value and ROI lies in its multiple RPA solution usage.”
The SLA is to ensure bots function optimally in a dynamic working environment. “We have found that once an RPA solution goes into deployment, the practicalities of the environment require some level of updating, similar to any other integrating software solution” says Little. “There are inevitably changes as the environment or data sources change. A bot can’t guess what’s required with there’s a change, so it needs to be updated in terms of the variables.”
Essentially, the partner programme enables every reseller, regardless of size or skills level, to make a success of the Roboteur RPA opportunities and deployments.
“If they want to be just a shopfront or sales house we enable them to be that; if they are growing into RPA, we can help them do that and make sure their customers have optimal value throughout the process.
“If they are a full-service partner and can do the whole project themselves, we are there for backup and more than happy to support them any way we can.
“Whether we do the design and build, or the reseller does it with our oversight, there is a compelling value proposition for the partner. And the customer gets a solution that works.
“The model is very attractive for all reseller partners.”
A strong focus on services is vital to the success of the entire RPA market, Little adds.
“The reseller is investing in Roboteur as a toolset to develop software automation solutions with. The customer is buying a bespoke RPA solution that is developed to execute on the Roboteur platform. So resellers can’t sell it as if it’s a ready product, and they really need to have some development skills onboard to create and develop a ‘ready’ product uniquely tailored to solve their customers automation requirements. That is the full value chain in RPA terms.
“Most of the RPA vendors have a direct go to market model for this reason. So many resellers are geared to sell product, but with RPA you have to get involved and both architect and build the solution.”
IDI has made solution development a lot easier with its low-code platform. “Even citizen developers can design and build solutions using Roboteur,” says Little. “But when you have complex customer environments, you need more developer skills.” Roboteur is specifically designed to make this journey easier and more practical than most.
Because Roboteur is built on an Open Stack, developers can use whichever language or tools they are most comfortable with to augment any design or development with if required.
“The bottom line is the RPA is about to become an inevitability, and the channel needs to ensure it adds that opportunity to its own offering,” Little adds
“With Roboteur, IDI offers a highly attractive proposition via its Partner Program that is supportive of the VAR channel like no other, offers margins like no other, and has a formula to ensure that VARS are able to, and capable of delivering automation software application solutions to End users that are effective, maintainable and cost positive to them by comparison to anyone else. “
State of the RPA market
The information technology (IT) industry is well-known for embracing new solutions, and RPA is one of the hottest new topics in 2022.
“I have noticed with new technology that there is always a lot of talk and a lot of hype, and the market gets really excited. Then there is resistance – not a push-back, but more like a reality check. And the next thing is, you find that everyone has engaged with it; people have unobtrusively adopted the technology and made it work for them.
“This is happening now with RPA: there has been a lot of talk which has quietened down now. This isn’t because people are pushing back, but because they are becoming familiar with it.
“So often in the hype stage, technology gets mythologized and it’s hard for customers or partners to get their heads around the reality. We’re at the stage now where people are trying to find real-world applications for the technology.”
Market forces driving the RPA use case are things like the Great Resignation is the US, Little says. “In South Africa, we have our own version with the skills shortage and skills flight that affects all pillars of enterprise.
“RPA finds itself in that space now, where the early adopters have done some strategic projects and RPA is now moving outside of that top tier of the enterprise into the broader market. Customers are now looking at the technology opportunistically.
“For RPA to become successful it needs to become ubiquitous, and address all tiers of customers – from the enterprise with to the desktop.”
IDI’s Roboteur addresses this need with a channel-centric product that offers solutions across all tier
What is Roboteur?
Roboteur is an RPA platform and development environment that makes it simple and inexpensive to automate processes.
As the world of work undergoes fundamental shifts, we are starting to realize that it’s not necessary for a worker to perform every process – at any rate, not a human worker.
The idea that computers are just as capable of performing certain tasks is quickly being replaced by the notion that they may actually be more appropriate, efficient and adept at certain repetitive tasks.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is all about letting technology take care of repetitive or automatable tasks, thus freeing up human workers to attend to things that require more creativity or non-linear thinking.
Built on IDI’s Z-One low-code development platform, Roboteur provides the tools needed to quickly and inexpensively build bots to automate processes.
For more information on Roboteur, click here