RPA – Cost of Automation Ownership

Let’s first review the one-time costs for automations.

Incubation Cost (One Time – Low Cost)

This is a one-time initial cost incurred when organizations start their automation journey. This includes the cost for evaluating the vendor products, tool trainings, development of proof of concepts/value and initial COE setup.

Process Discovery (One Time – Low Cost)

This cost is for process pipeline generation. Discovery is needed to evaluate business departments and map out different processes and tasks to determine the complexity or ease of implementation along with tangible business benefits from automation. Post Discovery, the process pipeline is prioritized for automation development based on these parameters.

Automation Development (One Time – High Cost)

After automation pipeline prioritization, the next step is to develop the automations. This involves establishing a development pod consisting of process analysts and RPA engineers. Although this is a high-cost component, it is a one time expense and a small percentage of the total cost of ownership.

The one time costs, or capital expenses, are required to establish your automations in production. However, they do not provide a lot of opportunity for overall cost optimization. Let’s now review the operating expenses. These are recurring costs and if not constantly optimized can negatively impact the business benefits that you are expecting from the automations.

RPA Platform License Costs (Recurring – High Cost)

Based on what tools you are using, license costs could potentially consume the largest portion of your total cost of automation ownership. On one end of the spectrum, we have the commercially licensed tools, platforms such as UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Power Automate. These tools have different licensing models. But typically, an organization would need to acquire licenses for the following:

1. Automation Management or Orchestration component – This is a central server component. Organizations generally need one of these for the production environment, hence this is a yearly fixed cost. However, organizations may also need addon licenses to establish redundancy and failover for the server.
2. Bots or Agents – These components are the runtime agents or robots which are installed on desktops or virtual machines to execute the processes assigned by the server component. Organizations will need multiple bot licenses based on the number of automations they intend to have in production. For example, if you need 50 bots to run 75 processes, you will need to procure 50 licenses. This also depends on what type of processes you have. There are different kinds of bots for different kinds of processes/goals. Dependent on need, organizations may need to pay for multiple kinds of bot licenses such as unattended and attended bots.
   Similarly, some platforms have their licensing models based on the number of users using the automations or the actual number of automations an organization runs as opposed to the number of bots.
3. Developer IDE or Development Studio – These are the tools used by developers to build automations. Typically, you will need a license for each named user.

In addition to production licenses, some platform vendors also mandate licenses for non-production environments (for development and testing). Also, there may be licenses for adjacent components such as intelligent document processing, chat bots, human-in-the-loop capability, and more.

Licenses from commercial platforms are generally renewed on a yearly basis and can add up significantly as organizations scale the number of automations they have in production. They are also independent of how well the bots are utilized. The objective should be to increase utilization and reduce the number of bots and licenses.

On the other hand, as RPA has become more mainstream, new pricing models have emerged. There are now other options available in the market that have zero bot license fee models for the core components such as building, running, and managing automations. Many of these platforms have advanced capabilities comparable and, in some cases, functionalities that are better than the commercial platforms. Taking the license cost out of the overall cost equation reduces the total cost of ownership tremendously. OpenBots is one an example of an enterprise-grade solution that has zero cost licensing and enables enterprises with an elastic model to scale automation as needed.

Infrastructure Cost (Recurring – Low Cost)

You may decide to go with an on-prem solution or a cloud solution. This includes the recurring expenses for virtual machines or severs that host bots and other platform components. This cost component is generally a small percentage of the total cost of ownership.

Automation Support and Maintenance Cost (Recurring – High Cost)

Automations need constant monitoring and maintenance as they can cause severe business disruptions during downtime. Organizations need to develop a team to support their processes post-production. The cost for automation support is one the largest operating costs for automations if not managed well. This includes the cost of monitoring, break-fix support, enhancements, optimizations, and issue resolutions by an IT team or a robotic operations center (ROC).

There are many techniques to optimize automation ownership cost. Being the largest cost components, the following provide the most opportunity for optimization.

1. RPA Platform Licensing Costs
2. Automation Support Costs

For more information on how to optimize these large costs of an automation program check out our tips in our “XYZ” Article or email us at info@openbots.ai