Client Profile
Our California-based client is a publicly traded, global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Since it was founded nearly 25 years ago, it has grown to 37,000+ employees in nearly 40 countries worldwide.
Business Challenge
The client’s automation program was thriving – but its Center of Excellence (CoE) faced a common challenge.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is never a “set it and forget it” investment. The underlying applications, systems, and runtime environments in which it operates are constantly changing – and some of these changes will inevitably disrupt a robot’s flow.
Since the client is a software company, frequent application changes outside the CoE’s control drove 60% of its RPA failures – risking frustration and loss of confidence from business teams. The constant need for support distracted developers from the innovation that drives business value as well, triggering a gap between business expectations and CoE delivery.
Significant challenges also stemmed from manual, time-consuming, error-prone testing processes – making it difficult to quickly determine whether an RPA project fulfilled its requirements or if new features or break-fixes would impact software currently in production.
All these factors created a stressful environment for RPA developers, risking impact to retention and job satisfaction amidst a severe talent shortage.
The client sought a solution that achieved 5 key objectives:
- Transition from Reactive to Proactive Maintenance. The client’s busy IT Department generally failed to notify the CoE about upcoming application changes. That left RPA teams in crisis mode as they scrambled to minimize business impact and restore functionality when automated business processes suddenly stopped working.
- Improve Automation Uptimes. Without a proactive strategy, 45% of companies suffer bot breakages weekly or more often. Constant break-fix cycles impact costs, productivity, and customer service. They eat into ROI and broader business objectives. They also cause organizational confidence to wane.
- Ensure RPA Quality. Proactively surfacing issues that can cause robots to break – and ensuring quality before new automation goes live – creates resilient, compliant, and high-performing robots.
- Increase Deployment Speed & Confidence. Traditional, manual software testing is a tedious endeavor. More than 1 in 3 developers cite insufficient testing time as the leading cause of software project failures as time constraints force focus toward task completion instead of test coverage or quality. The client wanted fast, structured, and accurate reassurance that projects fulfill their requirements.
- Boost Retention & Job Satisfaction. Testing automation and automation support rank among RPA developers’ most-hated tasks – involving repetitive, stressful, and undervalued work. Amidst the severe talent shortage, the client aimed to mitigate turnover by eliminating work that prevents developers from focusing on the innovation they enjoy.