Last week, WorkFusion announced that their robotic process automation product, RPA Express, will be released in 2017 as a free product; they published a blog post as well as the press release, and today they hosted a webinar to talk more about it. They are taking requests to join the beta program now, with a plan to launch publicly at the end of Q1 2017.
WorkFusion has a lot of interesting features in their RPA Express and Smart Process Automation (SPA) products, but today’s webinar was really about their business model for RPA Express. This is not a limited-time trial, it’s a free enterprise-ready product that can generate business benefit. Free to purchase and no annual maintenance fees, although you obviously have infrastructure costs for the servers/desktops on which RPA Express runs. Their goal in making it free is to bypass the whole RFP-POC-ROI dance that goes on in most organizations, where a decision to implement RPA – which typically can show a pretty good ROI within a matter of weeks – can take months. With a free product, one major barrier to implementation has been removed.
So what’s the catch? WorkFusion has a more intelligent automation tool, SPA, and they’re hoping that by seeing the benefits of using RPA Express, organizations will want to try out SPA on their more complex automation needs. RPA Express uses deterministic, rules-based automation, which requires explicit training or specification of each action to be taken; SPA uses machine learning to learn from user actions in order to perform automation of tasks that would typically require human intervention, such as handling unstructured and dynamic data. WorkFusion envisions a “stairway to digital operations” that starts with RPA, then steps up the intelligence with cognitive processing, chatbots and crowdsourcing to a full set of cognitive services in SPA.
This doesn’t mean that RPA Express is just a “starter edition” for SPA: there are entire classes of processes that can be handled with deterministic automation, such as synchronizing data between systems that may not talk to each other, such as SAP and Salesforce. This replaces having a worker copy and paste information between screens, or (horrors!) re-type the information in two or more systems; it can result in a huge reduction in cost and time, and remove the tedious work from people to free them up for more complex decision-making or direct customer interaction.
RPA Express bots can also be called from other orchestration and automation tools, including a BPMS, and can run on a server or on individual desktops. We didn’t get a rundown of the technology, so more to come on that as they get closer to the release. We did see one or two screens, and it’s based on modeling processes using a subset of BPMN (start and end events, activities, XOR gateways) that can be easily handled by a business user/analyst to create the automation flows, plus using recorder bots to capture actions while users are running through the processes to be automated. There was a mention of coding on the platform as well, although it was clear that this was not required in many cases, hence development skills are not essential.
Removing the cost of software changes the game, allowing more organizations to get started with this technology without having to do an internal cost justification for the licensing costs. There’s still training and implementation costs, but WorkFusion plans to provide some of this through online video courses, as well as having the large SIs and other partners trained to have this in their toolkit when they are working with organizations. More daunting is the architectural review that most new software needs to go through before being installed within a larger organization: this can still block the implementation even if the software is free.
I’m looking forward to seeing a more complete technical when the product is closer to launch date. I’m also looking forward to see how this changes the price point of RPA from other vendors.