Choosing the right partner for the hottest trend in technology: Robotics Process Automation

When I started Lydonia Technologies, I made two key observations on the market….

1. This RPA thing is real.  With a CAGR of 65% and an almost immediate ROI, this market is moving fast and I wanted to learn as much as possible.
2. Most of my technology peers were familiar with the concept of RPA but knew virtually nothing about it. We were an early entrant to a market that is a mere 4 years old in the United States.

I’ll start with my second observation. I spend most of my time with customers educating them on the value of RPA and less on the platform itself. RPA is still such a new concept that only a few industries understand the value prop and competitive advantage it can provide.

When Companies bring us in to consult, we spend a great deal of time listening to the customer. We go through several ideations to discover what workflows are the best candidates for automation. We typically look for workflows that can be measured – in their current state (humans performing the work) by four distinct metrics called the F L T C metrics:

• Frequency of that workflow (how often does it run)
• The number of people that become Liberated (freed up of mundane tasks) once the job is automated
• Time saved by the bot performing the task (sometimes measured in hundreds of hours)
• And lastly, how many people internally “Care” that somebody was liberated by performing a task they hated doing. Meaning: who’s going to be liberated or who can claim the savings!

Now back to my first point, this RPA thing is real and the ROI in this space is something I haven’t seen in technology. When we started Lydonia Technologies, we looked at the RPA landscape and determined two options. We could carry everybody’s RPA software and grow fast – or we could start with one product and become more strategic and trusted by their fast-growing sales and engineering teams. We didn’t make the decision based on a scientific formula, but rather looked at what Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and finally Everest Group all concluded. UiPath is the clear market leader and who we decided to partner with at Lydonia. With a current market valuation of $10.2B, UiPath will have a blockbuster IPO estimated sometime in 2021 (my guess, not confirmed).

In the meantime – our job at Lydonia Technologies is to create an awareness around the benefits of RPA, how to deploy it right, how to get it to pay for itself (because virtually none of these customers we have worked with have budget for this), and show customers how to sustain it at a low cost so that the ROI isn’t compromised. In the meantime, we have successfully deployed hundreds of bots freeing up over 750,000 hours of work that have now liberated humans to do what we do best – use our minds and to think.

Happy Automations!