RPA Breaks Link between FTEs and Service Transactions
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming a big deal in the services industry. For the last 10 years, the Indian IT industry attempted to affect pricing by breaking the link between FTEs and the services they provide. They tried outcome-based or transaction-based pricing. As I have blogged in the past, although this is interesting and has some utility; but it has both positive and negative consequences. And it’s an incomplete answer to severing the link; it prices the services differently, but it still maintains the link between the services and the people who do the work. But software accomplishes the goal with RPA. Here’s why it’s a big deal.
At Everest Group we’ve studied the impact of RPA’s disruption on BPO services. Automation and RPA break the link by replacing people with a piece of software sitting on a virtual server, which can be spun up at any time and then shut down when the work is done.
Great efficiencies come from RPA breaking the link between FTEs and services. Another significant benefit is that it enables delivering services in a consumption-based pricing model. Providers can match their costs against consumption. In the traditional FTE model, the people continue to be an inflexible cost over time, even after the provider switches them to work on another task or another client’s work. And reassigning them to other work draws out inherent friction and the problems of a learning curve.
In Silicon Valley, software firms used RPA to move from having 30 to 50 virtual servers per person five year ago to now having over 100,000 (and climbing) virtual servers per person. I believe the same potential lies in the services industry through leveraging RPA.
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