UK RPA provider The Robot Exchange will enter the automation market in the Netherlands soon. It is a market that is rapidly growing, with already a broad range of providers. But CIO Phil Johnston sees room for Robot Exchange because of some features in the offering, like the Robot-as-a-Service concept and The DeVol Recorder, which substantially speeds up deployment.
The Robot Exchange as a company goes back to 2018, and has realized a rapid growth in offering RPA solutions. More recently the company has launched a Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) product, based on its own technology platform, DeVol, a cloud based infrastructure underlying the offering. But there are still quite a few companies asking for on premise deployment, for example because of strict security regulations.
But how does this new company compare to RPA companies that already operate on the crowded Dutch market? “First of all, we are a lot cheaper”, CIO Phil Johnston says. “And on the technical side, we have created a module that we’ve called the DeVol Recorder. Typically, if you need RPA somebody will spend time capturing the requirements. And then they have to develop the solution, which could take weeks of development.”
DeVol Recorder
“We have a tool we can place on a server or on the laptop of a client who wants to automate a manual process. When they complete this process our software is recording things like user inputs and what’s happening on the screen. And in real time automatable code is being generated through to our platform, which becomes almost instantaneously executable. So a medium complex process that typically might have taken four weeks to develop, maybe another week of testing, we’re bringing that down to the two or three days.”
Of course it can save time, but there are other benefits. We have a lot of clients within the financial services sector who have to deal with regulation. So if you have humans completing processes they can make mistakes. But a robot will do the same thing all the time, every time. So we have found that certain clients have experienced better feedback on their audits. But it is still important to know the bounds of what RPA can do. Because of course, it doesn’t work magic, it can’t be everything. But you can be creative with what processes the company should focus on first.
Partnering
According to Johnston the Dutch market is in many ways quite similar to the UK. “There’s a lot of interest in technology. Our objectives are really two things: looking at partnering with consultants that wish to offer their clients RPA as part of their digital transformation, and don’t have the expertise to do that yet. And we do direct sales to clients. And finally, we are open to partnering with RPA providers in the Dutch market who see our technology and want to white label our solution.”
