Guest Blog - Gabriel Hoff is a Senior Product Manager at Blueprint Software Systems

Your organization has used the same RPA platform for years. You were happy with its capabilities and, for the most part, it served its purpose. The world has changed, however, and along with it the way your organization does business. Consequently, your RPA platform is no longer providing the value it promised. You’re spending more time managing problems than delivering solutions, and so you want to switch providers. Sound familiar?

Despite RPA’s growth in popularity, there’s equal interest across the automation space to switch RPA tools. Many RPA vendors have oversold their ease of implementation and ability to capture value in the market. This is the primary driver of a large number of competitive account transitions in 2021 as companies abandon their RPA vendor for an alternative.

There are lots of reasons why companies want to change RPA platforms. They have been unable to scale automation across the enterprise or realize the ROI they were promised because of crippling RPA maintenance and support issues. Companies have painfully discovered that automation isn't as easy as they were told, leaving them wondering if they picked the wrong RPA tool and are better off trying another.

Many RPA vendors have also over-promised and under-delivered on the ease of RPA implementation. The illusion that citizen developers could drive automation never materialized. Now, organizations want to try their luck with a different approach and a new RPA provider.

Some organizations have inadvertently set up disconnected, independent automation initiatives within different business lines, also known as islands of automation, another motive for wanting to switch. The consequences include a lack of quality, disparate automation design practices, and inflated costs by procuring multiple RPA tools. This isn't a case for switching RPA vendors, but rather, employing the best practice and cost-saving measure of consolidating all automations in a singular platform.

Historically, the burden of switching RPA providers has simply been too high and complicated by several issues. There is a significant catalog of commands, variables, and activities that are unsupported between RPA tools, rendering bots incompatible from one platform to the other.

Historical versions of bots can also be lost when migrating, impacting compliance, and impact analysis activities in the target RPA tool. Audit logs aren't stored the same way between different RPA tools and may be lost altogether when migrations are attempted. There is also no effective and straightforward way to run output compares of bots migrated between different RPA tools. This makes it exceedingly difficult to test the completeness and quality of bots after the migration, ensuring they still do what they were designed to.

The sum of these challenges means that changing RPA vendors requires entire bot portfolios to be rebuilt from scratch. The manual effort and operational cost alone are enough to deter organizations from attempting a switch. Automation programs are essentially locked into whichever RPA vendor they initially chose, whether they're satisfied or not. That was the case, but it no longer has to be.

Blueprint, for example, has radically simplified RPA migrations between all leading RPA tools, unlocking the entire market.

On Tuesday, December 7th Blueprint will host “Who Moved My Bots,” a live panel of automation experts who will discuss RPA platform migration in detail, including:

• What’s triggering RPA migrations into other platforms

• The benefits and costs of moving your RPA portfolio into another vendor

• How to measure the success of an RPA migration

• Best practices for anyone looking to migrate RPA vendors in the next 6-12 months

Panelists on the webinar include:

• Stephen Siciliano - GM Power Automate at Microsoft

• Prashant Hinge - VP Automation at Hanover Insurance

• Shail Khiyara - Intelligent Automation Executive

• Dan Shimmerman - CEO at Blueprint Software Systems

Reserve your seat to the discussion at https://www.blueprintsys.com/lp/rpa/webinar-who-moved-my-bots and learn how can switch to the RPA platform that’s right for your company.

Gabriel Hoff is a Senior Product Manager at Blueprint Software Systems