Why Should A Business Hire An RPA Developer Or RPA Consultant?

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Outsource RPA Developer

There are many reasons why a business would want to hire an RPA Developer or Consultant. Some companies will want to hire them to save money or be more productive. Others will want to improve their compliance and work accuracy. Still others may automate to collect more data so that they can implement better decision making and intelligent analytics.

There is a great quote by Mark Cuban that speaks to the urgency of understanding and leveraging AI, ML and RPA.  Cuban said, “Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, machine learning — whatever you are doing if you do not understand it — learn it.  Because otherwise you are going to be a dinosaur within 3 years.” 

Large enterprises have been getting into the AI, automation, and RPA game for at least the last decade or more.  Fortune 1000 companies often hire their own expensive workers to do this, or they contract with expensive tier 1 consulting and outsourcing firms. Medium sized companies and small businesses so far have only been dabbling in automation and RPA and adoption has been much slower. However, this does not need to be the case.  At Valenta we focus exclusively on SMB clients and provide many of the same services as the tier 1 consulting and outsourcing firms.

In the remainder of this article, we will touch on why companies use RPA, outsourced RPA developer services, RPA developer staff augmentation, the role of a RPA developer, and how to outsource RPA developers and consultants.

Why Automate?  Why Leverage RPA? 

Reduce Expenses

The adoption of RPA is growing fast and is accelerating.  The National Association of Software and Services Companies estimates that cost efficiencies to companies with in-house deployments of RPA is in the 35-65% cost savings range.  The ability of RPA to be flexibly deployed on top of existing business applications greatly reduces any roadblocks for large enterprises and SMBs to use RPA.  When you combine the cost savings with the ability to redeploy people to high value tasks the results can be staggering.

Productivity

If RPA implementations are well thought out, a bot can be working every nanosecond, … something a human cannot do.  Bots can navigate screens, point, and click, copy, and paste and do calculations in seconds.  Bots need to be focused on rules based and repetitive tasks to get the best ROI but there is typically plenty of that type of work to be done in today’s data and document driven companies.  We typically find that bots perform tasks at 20x the speed of humans.  However even if they are working at twice the pace, or the same pace, being able to work 24/7/365 increases productivity dramatically.

Accuracy

A bot never gets tired, never gets bored and never gets distracted like a human can.  Therefore, a bot never or rarely makes mistakes.  When there are inaccuracies related to bots it usually comes back to poor input data or needing to tweak the design of an RPA by the human developer.  One really glaring example of where accuracy is critical is IT security and IT data breaches.  One recent study found that 90% of data breaches occurred due to human error.

Compliance

An RPA bot can perform predefined sets of instructions and do them the same way every time.  An RPA bot will never get distracted and deviate from a required and pre-defined workflow.  An RPA bot’s tasks can easily be captured and logged, and as a consequence, provide an easy to access accurate audit trail.  All these characteristics of RPA make a great case for using it in compliance, governance, auditing, and risk management.

Better Analytics

A bot never loses or misplaces information and never forgets to report or update data.  The automation of data collection and the guarantee that it is getting captured and placed in the applications and programs of a business can do wonders for accurate, prompt, and complete collection of data related to transactions, customer interaction, inventory and more.  RPA can automatically run dashboards, publish, and share them.  This reporting capability, the reliable capture of data, and automation of business analytics is often an overlooked opportunity for RPA to help a business.

What does an RPA Developer & Consultant do? 

An RPA Developer and Consultant is responsible for developing, integrating, testing, and maintaining existing and new RPA-based solutions.  They consider the use of different automation platforms and technologies which can be implemented as part of a business’s digital transformation and will select and implement the best ones for the requirements.  They will create automation processes using RPA tools and other development tools and integrate them into existing business processes.  RPA Developers and Consultants create and maintain documentation for all developed workflows. They create new automation processes as well as maintain and modify existing RPA bot processes to improve performance, correct errors/bugs, and adapt to any new configurations that may impact them.  RPA Developers and Consultants engage with the entire team at a business to make sure all the bases are covered.  They interview executives and users to make sure automation projects achieve an ROI and deliver all the desired outcomes.

Costs for RPA Developers & Consultants

RPA developers and Consultants are in high demand and the salaries for the role reflect this.  The Glassdoor salaries web page states that an RPA Developer earns 101.2K USD a year in Boston MA, 102K USD annually in Denver CO and103.7K USD a year in Los Angeles CA.  The salary is also competitive in Canada where Glassdoor finds an average salary of 76.5K CAD a year in Toronto.  Those salaries are just the average ones, and the best performers will earn more.  These annual salary averages do not reflect the cost of taxes, benefits, overhead, and infrastructure.  When you add all of that together you get the full costs.  Outsourced RPA developer services can often fill these roles for 30% of those total expenses.  When considering that point, plus all the benefits that RPA and automation can bring a business … it is easy to see why an outsourced RPA developer is increasingly an attractive option for SMBs.

RPA Developer & Consultant Staff Augmentation

Whether or not a business decides to leverage staff augmentation or hire inhouse staff for RPA they will want to look for the same types of skills and qualifications in personnel.  A bachelor’s degree in IT or computer sciences is a hard requirement.  Sometimes a degree in finance or business can be useful in addition.  IT experience and understanding of programming concepts is also needed.  Programming experience in specific coding language(s) like .NET and MS Power Automate or other robotics process automation technology experience should also be looked for.  Besides Microsoft, which is not always the best fit for every application, experience with specific vendors like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, or Blue Prism is also recommended.  It is also good to have RPA Developer Certifications from these vendors.  Valenta works with all of these providers and has staff trained and certified in their solutions.

When it comes to how to outsource RPA developers, if engaging with an outsourced RPA developer services provider like Valenta, SMBs will want to make sure that they have access to flexible commercial terms and can ramp up and scale down quickly and without penalty.  They will also want to evaluate the countries service providers operate in so that they can ensure there is a steady pool of talent.  In addition, they should evaluate the infrastructure and political stability in those countries.  SMBs looking for an outsourced RPA developer or developers will want to make sure that a service provider provides their own layer of management or staff, and that workers are operating out of well-equipped service centers.

Want to Learn More

At Valenta we are focused on serving SMB clients exclusively.  We provide new economy and information economy roles in addition to RPA Developers such as Python Developers, Cyber Security Engineers, Cloud Engineers, Big Data Specialists, DevOps Engineers, Data Security Analysts and more.  Valenta provides traditional BPO services like accounting, bookkeeping, administration, billing staff, paralegals, paraplanners, medical scribes and assistants, digital marketers, IT staff, software administrators and more.  In addition to providing staff augmentation and outsourcing we also provide business process consulting plus digital transformation services that include automation, RPA, and conversational AI.

We have Managing Partners located in cities across the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, and Australia.  Our Managing Partners work with other onshore consultants, plus offshore consultants, developers, and managers of outsourced staff to deliver the best services to our clients.  Please find this link to our page about RPA Consultants and Developers.  To contact us on this topic or any other, please reach out to us here.

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