What’s the best RPA tool?

Published on 9th December 2020 By Eileen O'Mahony

RPA is the new must in the world of business. You know that. You may also know what processes you want to automate. What you don’t know is what tool to choose.

The first step is to clarify what you want. Why? Because there is no one ‘BEST’ tool. However, there will be a tool that best meets YOUR needs. So… what do you need to consider?

Let’s start with whether the product’s technical aspects meet your needs. What are you planning to automate? Although you have identified some processes that are ripe for automation, it is likely that you won’t have identified all of them. Therefore, you need to consider what your future plans may entail. It may be that the processes you are currently considering do not require a tool with screen scraping capabilities nor a tool with cognitive or intelligent automation capabilities but what about future processes? Like every business, you will be hoping to grow. Will the product scale as you grow? In our experience, you may be considering RPA for one process or one department but you’ll quickly realize the benefits of RPA and want to scale your bots across your organisation. Is the product innovative? Do you need a solution that runs on premise, in the cloud or both? One of the first considerations for our banking and healthcare clients is security. What is your requirement? Do you need a tool that can easily connect to Windows Active Directory or LDAP to maintain single-sign on credentials? Security, scalability, reliability, and automation functions are just some of the product specification considerations worth attention.

Our clients come from a range of sectors  -banking, retail, legal, education and public health to name a few. Very different sectors but they all have one thing in common – they all want value for money. Price matters! When considering the various tools, it is not just the license costs that need to be considered. The total cost of ownership will include maintenance costs and deployment costs. Closely linked to these costs is how easy it is to build bots with the tool and how easy it is to maintain. It can be difficult to work out the financial costs of maintenance but don’t forget to consider the qualitative benefits of the ease of maintenance as well, e.g., increased employee productivity and job satisfaction.

Talking about maintenance leads to the consideration of the vendor relationship and customer service. How does the vendor treat their customers? What do they offer in terms of support? How responsive are they post deployment and implementation? The less experience you have, the more this matters. The bigger you are, the more this matters. The less budget you have the more this matters. Basically, this matters regardless of who you are.

Let’s talk a little more about implementation. When you want to automate a new process, you want it to be speedy and simple. Take the time to understand what can be created using recording macros, what can be readily deployed, what can be customized using the drag-and-drop feature or which features require intensive coding. Perhaps you want your bots built in-house. How feasible is that? Is the solution’s design environment simple enough for a business analyst to create a new robot without requiring coding skills? If you plan to build robots internally, what training does the vendor offer? Where training material is not available or is very expensive, the in-house team will struggle to deliver and keep updated with product developments and new features.

There’s a lot to think about! Here at WM Promus, we’ve already given all of the above and more some thought. We trust our partners. We work with tools that are technically sophisticated. But key to what we do is remain vendor agnostic. We don’t believe that one tool suits all. Talk to us today about what your RPA plans are and we’ll help you find the right tool for you.