RPA, having a bad day?

What a week (year) for #RPA eh?

You know, one of the biggest misunderstood things about RPA is the misnomer that it will be easy! That by putting a veneer on top of screen scraping technologies that Microsoft released 20+ years ago with Windows 95 (and a bit enhanced since) plus some free screen reading OCR will somehow allow you to overcome decades of customized desktop applications, convoluted user interfaces and code that's sometimes on it's last legs that it all sits on. Dream on. What you've been reading in the news recently about vendors struggling to grow, vendors getting crushed on valuations over the past year, the erosion of license pricing, the buying of "land-grab" accounts with tiny seedling/freebie deals and the number of RPA vendors that have crept into the affray is testament to the fact that something is going very very awry! As they say, if it looks like pig, smells like a pig then maybe it's just a...

The underlying tools inside RPA products are easy to aquire and mostly free and I've discussed this before (it's why you have so many RPA tools to choose from and it's getting cheaper and cheaper to do). This is why there is price erosion that's hurting all RPA vendors. Microsoft did RPA back in 2005 with a product called CCF which was an RPA on every desk in the contact center so don't be fooled that this message is somehow new! They moved this into other parts of Microsoft in 2008! So, yes, Microsoft own most of the technology that RPA vendors use for free, and then charge you for it (get it yourself here ; Free RPA).

To get this out of the way. Let me re-iterate. There are absolutely some processes that are easy to automate with RPA. Simpler web apps, simple desktop apps and Microsoft Office (heck you could automate Office with DDE, OLE and COM (and macros) since the beginning of time. Simpler processes that are less fragmented, well documented and not complex. And understandably, there is is a strong need for businesses to drive efficiency urgently and thus, when they read what they read from people that have no idea what RPA really is - they turn to these tools in the desperate hope that this really is some kind of nirvana. A select few have been able to very successfully automate their sub-kingdoms of manual work but this is not how a market is created and all analysts, without exception are questioning still where the scale is! Few are lucky enough to have such simple application and desktop environments and thus most have to sit there and remain envious of the few that are successful. It is these fewer successes that are brought out into the public spotlight to make you feel as if you are the only ones doing something wrong and that it must be you, your team or your delivery partner as to why you are not on the list of scaling!

As a side note, there's new hype around RPA forming around automating email and documents using AI, OCR and Natural Language Processing (NLP) with machine learning! Sure, it is built into a few select RPA vendors products where it's secured, processed and deployed, but most RPA vendors just pretend it is theirs (slick marketing). Then they send you to one of the open cloud AI vendors where it's readily available as a plugin API for anyone to license (some free) too! Still, add AI to anything and apparently you have "Intelligent RPA". Mmmm.

Some "experts" with absolutely ZERO understanding of actually how the windows operating system works (they think they don't have to) are writing books and telling customers how easy RPA is. Ask those experts if they know what an encapsulated application is? Why Microsoft updates can bring bots to their knees? How to automate an ActiveX control securely in a web frame (without being forced to use OCR)? How to grab data from a Cell from a custom Grid that no-one has the source to and isn't a standard windows control or is running in a win32 frame inside a WPF Container with mountains of menu tree controls, multiple scroll bars, languages, colors and font differentiations - again without being forced to used brittle scraping OCR? Ask the experts why all of the RPA vendors allow you (some force you) to drop down and write code .net/Java script ,or have to reverse engineer DLL's, XML, or insert custom logic to get at objects. Search a little deeper into the public forums for the RPA vendors how-to's and see how quickly you are forced too do exceptions and work-arounds (complex code examples) for even what appears a simple thing? Ask the experts why RPA vendors still have to fly in engineers from other countries to get you over even little hills when RPA stalls with complex apps? Ask these same experts why they think OCR is an OK fall back to automate a screen and get away charging for it? Why do I have to lock-the keyboard / mouse? Force Focus? Send data to public OCR services? Send clicks to screen areas (unreliable) or change my automations when the screen resolution changes or sometimes wants to switch from English to French or Spanish? Ask the RPA experts why some forms of RPA techniques are nearly 100 times slower than others? I think the only thing some see, is the gloss. Under the covers, all of the RPA vendors have these and many types of other Achilles heels that stop RPA in its tracks but many experts don't want you to know, or haven't taken the time to get to know it for themselves.

Remember this if nothing else. Enterprise business users don't get to choose their desktops or the applications that run on or how they were compiled, what updates get applied (from IT or Microsoft) or how 3rd party web apps are put together. These business don't don't know, that what I've described above is more than likely what's running on those desktops and in those browsers. RPA vendors will mask this too in quick win POC's,m often by just throwing some OCR at the screens, send some mouse moves and clicks and then using send keys to make it look like the very nirvana it clearly is not.

The point is, you are just now starting to see the backlash from all of the above and it will only accelerate. It's not JUST because you picked the wrong team or didn't put in a COE or picked the wrong RPA product (though it may be). The very experts who claim to know how RPA works will walk-away if you raise any of these questions and point you back to the few successes where business were lucky enough to be using standard applications with a few (supportable by all) common user interfaces. And then blame you anyway! In my experience, to do RPA at scale, you need to be able to understand (or have experts that do) and deal with all of the above or you will never get to scale - and not just sit back and watch the RPA vendors move on to the next client when it all starts to go wrong - or the ROI disappears faster than a vanilla ice-cream in an outdoor park in Dubai in August.

If you want to ever talk to me or our other REAL experts about how we have large banks, telcos, government, healthcare, insurance companies and many more with 1000's of bots built and supported by handfuls of people we are open to talk to you - and show you how. Yes, they had these issues. We don't pretend it's all easy but we do show you what's REALLY possible and what's not. They've had the issues your likely to have but we got them through it to deliver massive ROI. We might not be in the land-grab RPA bot market but we are into solving real enterprise problems with real RPA, real AI and real low-code, one or all together!