Confession of a Reformed RPA Software Rep. – RPA Supervisor

Dear RPA Software Sales Gladiators,

I write to you as a recovering RPA seller of 5+ years. After a year in the outside world and a lot of time with the less indoctrinated, it may be time to share some confessions. There is no perfect place to start but let’s start with a big topic. I was wrong about RPA Supervisor.  

Trigger Warning: I interchangeably use the terms BOT, Digital Worker, and run-time. 

What is RPA Supervisor?

RPA Supervisor is an automation management platform that adds monitoring, orchestration, analytics, and integration capabilities to the most prevalent RPA platforms. As a separate application, RPA Supervisor can perform satellite support tasks such as restarting VDIs. RPA Supervisor can also orchestrate multiple RPA technologies within a single pane of glass.

The most fundamental reason to consider RPA Supervisor is its machine learning-based scheduler. With RPA Supervisor, you drop those manually maintained calendars of run schedules in the RPA platform. Instead, within RPA Supervisor, you define a range of parameters such as target response time, working days, deadlines, and related conditions for every process. You also establish resource pools where multiple machines can run processes simultaneously. RPA Supervisor then takes over as the orchestrator, optimizing schedules to eliminate those gaps where your Digital Workers sit idle. Interested in diving deeper into the orchestration benefits? Watch our webinar with Erik Lien, CEO of RPA Supervisor, on-demand.

Utilization Impact is Variable

At the most fundamental level, RPA Supervisor’s optimized schedule will allow your customers to do more with every Digital Worker, BOT, run-time, or your favorite replaceable buzzword.

The impact of this utilization improvement changes dramatically between programs. Electric Utility E.ON posted a 50% license efficiency gain, while BN Bank claims 62%. 

I recently wrapped an RPA Supervisor deployment where, before our engagement, the customer only utilized 20% of their license capacity over the past five years. More on this later….

For a quick idea on the utilization impact of RPA Supervisor, a customer can open their RPA control room and estimate the % of unscheduled white space calendars. It would be nearly impossible for an RPA Controller to safely eliminate all scheduling gaps without a massive amount of monitoring around variable target system performance and volumes. However, RPA Supervisor takes a machine-learning approach to collapse all those pockets of dead time.

License Reduction

At this point, you are probably wondering why I am suggesting a technology that will kill your quota attainment. I thought the same thing in your shoes. Every first look at RPA Supervisor triggers an initial reaction that the platform is a way to reduce RPA licensing. However, while RPA Supervisor will allow each Digital Worker to do more work, license reduction alone isn’t a logical justification for the platform.

First, your contracts are probably not month-to-month. If your customer were to instantly unlock 50% of their BOT licensing halfway into a three-year term, it is still a very long time before there is any impact on license spending.

RPA Supervisor also has a license cost based on your RPA license count. Generally, a break-even on licensing alone would require a 30 – 40% reduction in RPA licenses. This is a joint utilization impact, but I wouldn’t advise a business case that solely revolves around shifting license spending between technology vendors. Fortunately, the real benefit of an RPA Supervisor has nothing to do with license arbitrage.

The Real Benefits

All RPA software sellers share two clear and common goals with customers.

1. Do more with your RPA Platform.
2. Reduce the cost per automation. 

RPA Supervisor helps with both. For example, customers can take on more processes with the following:

• Difficult to forecast volumes and process execution
• Tight SLAs can result in compliance or lost opportunities if missed
• Real-time event notifications to business SMEs or business leaders

These significantly impact the ability to unlock application or forms-based automation in an unattended configuration.

RPA Supervisor also reduces overhead costs and the late-night support scrambles by:                                                 

• Automatically intervening on restarting terminated processes, user login/logouts, and locked screens.
• Preventing automations from running against a target application with planned downtime
• Restarting VDIs due to frozen sessions, endless looping, and irregular performance
• Powering down cloud based VDIs that aren’t necessary for current volumes
• Displaying 50+ pre-build dashboards to monitor real-time operations

We see far too many companies bogged down with the maintenance of hundreds of schedules. RPA Supervisor allows customers to spend more time and budget building new automations instead of tackling production incidents. It also reduces the reputational risk of a surprise pile-up due to an overnight process failure.

Let’s Get Real World

Remember that customers only utilized 20% of RPA license capacity? They constantly missed process deadlines across 100+ unattended processes. The controller headcount to tackle this would have been astronomical manually, so the COE threw licenses and hardware at the problem instead. This pattern seemed like a win for the sales rep., but the associated cost meant the business had started its move to minimize the use of RPA. Fortunately, we redirected this cancelation trajectory through the introduction of RPA Supervisor. The customer has renewed business confidence in RPA and a lower Total Cost of Ownership.

Finally, for you RPA Software Salespeople, it is essential to note that RPA Supervisor can help you immediately expand license uptake. I wrapped one deployment where RPA Supervisor’s license projection was the key to gaining budget approval for 2023 growth. Another deployment found that they needed to add 40 more RPA licenses to meet a critical SLA for online car loan approvals. These BOTs expedited approvals by 2 minutes, and the change dramatically impacted win rates.

Summary

It is easy to see RPA Supervisor as a threat to your quota attainment, but it isn’t. A more practical, cost-effective program helps you, the RPA software seller. It opens use cases while reducing operational spending, ultimately leading to the most successful RPA programs.

I’m signing off, but need more convincing? Please drop me a note, and let’s chat about it one-on-one.

Looking for a demo of the tool? Sign up for our newsletter and stayed tuned for next month’s Tech Talk with RPA Supervisor’s Wesley Dunn.

Sell on,

Your fellow reformed RPA software sales aficionado