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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

You Are All Frogs Boiling in a Pot: Robotic

Process Automation and the Death of BPOs

Dustin Strydom
Vice President
Open Box Software

e are in the early stages of the Fourth Industrial human race will soon not be able to ignore, and will be a disrup-
Revolution that is set to transform the way we work, tor of an industry that has thrived over the past 15 years.
W live and interact. The scale of this transformation will
be one that we as human beings have never experienced before. 1. You are all frogs boiling in a pot
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the comput- Everyone wants their best people spending time on tasks
erization of the Third Industrial that are strategic and valuable. In
Revolution with the latest, rapidly reality, the picture is very different.
evolving and disruptive advances According to a recent survey
in technology that is set to blur the conducted by YouGov, 59 percent
lines between the physical, digital of U.S. employees stay past their
and biological spheres. typical hours to take care of their
One such disruptor in this work and more than 80 percent
revolution is Robotic Process of respondents (with an annual
Automation (RPA), the applica- income of at least $80,000) said they
tion of technology that enables routinely don’t complete what is
computer software to partially or on their to-do lists. More than 90
fully automate activities which are percent of respondents said that
manual, repetitive and rule-based. they spend 25 percent or less of
Not a particularly new concept, nor a seemingly vast technolog- their day working on creative business ideas or leads. Why are our
ical advancement; however, RPA technology has now reached a skilled employees spending the majority of their day performing
level of robustness that allows effective roll-out across business tasks that could be done by a robot?
processes at a price point well below traditional Business Process The reality is, we are all frogs boiling in a pot. As an IT commu-
Outsourcing (BPO). nity, we have been witness to the incremental improvements
How is RPA different than traditional automation tools such in automation technology over time, and as such, are failing to
as screen scraping, macros and scripts? RPA software robots realize that the technology has “reached boiling point.” We are
interpret the user interface of applications and execute steps failing to recognize that the revolution is here. RPA technology is
the same way a human user would; they are ‘trained’ rather than finally in a position where it is able to add significant value at a
programmed using code-based instructions. Furthermore, RPA is price point that provides massive ROIs. When this level of ROI is
technology agnostic and can operate on any application that a communicated to someone outside of the ‘pot’ it is obvious as to
human can, requires no complex integration, rolls out faster and the value that can be achieved. We, the IT community, need to
costs less. shift our mind-set to take advantage of this.
Due to its flexibility, RPA technology can be trained to follow
industry specific processes and ‘learn’ to interact with industry 2. Business Process Outsourcing is dead, long live
specific systems, thereby enabling any number of robots to draw Outsourcing
on this knowledge without having to reinvent the wheel every The traditional offshore BPOs are successful largely because
time. Open Box has taken this a step further by creating a Real they can offer a significant cost benefit obtained through labor
Estate Specific Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Automation Engine arbitrage. At a simple level, an onshore BPO resource typically
using best-of-breed RPA software and training it for Real Estate costs roughly $60,000, with an offshore resource at around
specific processes. $23,000. RPA performing the work of one full time equivalent
RPA is the start of a dramatic change in the concept of work as (FTE) could cost as little as $10,000. You will likely not be able to
we know it today. It is the beginning of an ethical dilemma the achieve savings illustrated by this one-for-one cost comparison,

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