3 things you should ask your RPA supplier-to-be.

We all know what to ask our suppliers about. Pricing, timing, SLA – that’s obvious. However, every technology has its limitations and conditions we are not always aware of. That’s why I thought it could be useful to clarify some extra questions that your RPA supplier-to-be should answer.

1.     What does the pricing offer include?

Well, I’m sure your RFP consists of that criterium. Still, I would advise you to ask a couple of extra questions that will let you avoid unpleasant surprises in the future. And these questions would be:

• Will I be able to create new robots without additional costs?
• Will I be able to modify my existing robots without additional costs?
• Will I be able to change/manage data sources for my robots? How would that exactly work?
• Will I be able to manage more than 5-10 robots without additional costs?

Because if you plan to develop your RPA possibilities within the company, you will have to face all those challenges.  

2.     What happens if…

IT project lifecycles have their ups and downs in almost every company. Sometimes sudden pivots may cut the resources and the project faces severe limitations.

Sometimes the recruitment situation may become a real blocker – whatever you do, you just can’t find the right people to take care of IT matters (especially when we’re talking about such non-core technology as RPA).

And speaking of non-core technologies – sometimes the costs (financial and others) of maintaining it may unexpectedly become too high.

What then? Will you be forced to quit RPA and kill your robots with all of advantages they bring? Will the supplier be able to help you with that issue? And how?

3.     The experience.

Obvious thing. Still, there is one aspect of robotic experience I’d encourage you to dwell on. And that would be ROBOTIZATION PER CLIENT Index (RCI). What is their robotization per client index? Here’s the formula:

Total number of robots working/total number of clients = Robotization per Client Index.

If you are planning to derive 100% from RPA – to create and manage a whole robotic hive working for your success - you should know one thing. Creating the first robot is not an issue. There’s othe aspect you should be concerned about: undisturbed proceeding with automated integration out what Phil Fersht has to say about it, you’ll find the link in the comment). And only with mature integration your robotization project will become a real success.  

Make sure that your supplier has that experience. And I don’t mean the whole “Important International RPA Supplier Inc.”. I mean this particular team that you are planning to cooperate with – and I mean actually written robots.

If it’s a one-figure number, you’d better rethink your choice.

If you’d like to know what our RCI is, let me know in a comment or in a private msg, I’ll be happy to share it.

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Did you find something useful in my article? Or nothing new? Please, share what you think in comments.

Justyna