Robotic Process Automation Is A Channel Game-Changer: COLUMN

CPP Associates said the ROI on robotic process automation is nothing short of mind-boggling.

Robotic process automation is one of those breatkthrough technologies that fuels off-the-charts ROI for customers and big profits for solution providers.

Pat O’Dell, general manager and managing partner for solution provider superstar CPP Associates, Clinton, N.J., calls it the kind of ROI that makes customers “raving advocates” for his company. In fact, he said, the ROI on RPA is nothing short of mind-boggling.

A large fast-growing services company that CPP is working with is expected to save more than $2 million over a three-year period by automating invoicing. The RPA solution is allowing the company to meet rising customer demand without hiring as many as six new employees in a tight job market.

An RPA solution that CPP delivered for a large multinational bank, meanwhile, is saving it more than $1 million on a $200,000 initial investment. That RPA solution is saving costly errors and even potential fines.

Finally, a global investment bank is looking at saving astronomical sums by reducing the amount of work on deals done by junior investment bankers in a solution that could automate 80 percent of the work they were doing and in the process save the customer multiple millions of dollars.

“I was shocked and excited when I saw these returns,” said O’Dell. “The only reason I started in this business 35 years ago and still remain in it is to continue to help clients in a way that makes them raving advocates. That is why I do this.”

That kind of reaction to technology only comes along once in a great while. It happened when O’Dell started working at EMC in the 1980s and helped customers save as much as a day of processing time out of every week in many instances with intelligent, faster storage, it happened when VMware consolidated servers at a blistering pace, and it happened when the public cloud eliminated huge costs for customers looking at delivering agile IT without a big capital expenditure. “This is the biggest opportunity since public cloud grabbed 25 percent of the market,” O’Dell said. “RPA, automation and analytics is the next wave.”

O’Dell credits Automation Anywhere, one of the rising stars in the RPA field, with helping to drive the RPA revolution within the CPP customer base. “We looked at many, many tools and we use many tools for automation, machine learning and analytics, and we found Automation Anywhere was the easiest to quantify large ROI,” he said. “That is why we are focusing the most on them.”

CPP is also using Automation Anywhere to automate its own internal marketing operations. “We are now putting out three times as many marketing campaigns as a result of using automation,” he said. “We are also now three times quicker with these campaigns.”

RPA is a “no-brainer” for CEOs, CIOs and CFOs looking for tighter business- IT alignment, said O’Dell. “I feel that any CFO that gives me 15 minutes to talk about RPA and what we are doing will find it is time well spent,” he said. “We are giving CFOs cost savings, efficiency gains and more options. We are saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and helping them utilize the resources they have more efficiently.” That’s the kind of ROI that is sure to make CEOs, CIOs and CFOs “raving advocates” for their solution provider partners.