How the right kind of Automation support can save a lot more money than it costs.

Readers of this blog series on RPA support may recall that in the last edition I stated that post-production RPA support cannot really be likened to car insurance. I can see why the insurance analogy is popular, as, like car insurance, one of the benefits of RPA support is peace of mind should anything go wrong. But that is really where the similarities end. Whilst insurance is reactive and beneficial only after something has gone wrong, the right kind of RPA support can uncover latent problems within both infrastructure and processes to find areas of improvement before they become incidents that impact the business. 

At Virtual Operations, we have been providing post-production support to a Fortune 100 FMCG business for 6 years, helping them scale from a single RPA process supporting a single time zone to over 700 processes with 24/7 support. Our Control Tower service both plans and manages the growth of their infrastructure, including databases, application servers, and virtual machines. 

So how does this end up saving a lot more money than it costs?  

Firstly, as we have overseen their capacity management over the past five years, we have helped to optimise infrastructure costs and dramatically reduced the number of software licenses, virtual machines and databases they require. This in turn has led to substantial cost savings and improved our client’s return on investment in RPA. 

Secondly, Control Tower minimises the demand on our client's in-house team, as we take care of all platform and process monitoring, code migrations, infrastructure management, process debugging, process re-runs, and automated reboots. We also bring expertise in identifying and deploying the right tools at the right time to manage efficiency aspects such as capacity optimisation. 

The result? In our client’s own words:

“Control Tower has protected our investment in Intelligent automation over the years, driving a significant improvement in process uptime, and enabling us to grow our business with confidence knowing our critical processes will scale with our changing needs. We estimate they have saved us over $200million in potential downtime and other costs to date.” 

$200million is a substantial number over 6 years, even for a business the size of our client. In fact, it represents a return on investment of well over 5,000%, which goes to show how the right kind of support goes well beyond providing peace of mind.