Compared to legacy RPA technologies that cost $7 additional dollars in implementation for every $1 you pay for licensing the technology, IPA makes good financial sense. Especially when you factor in an additional $7 for every $1 spent in licensing that it costs customers to maintain these legacy products over a 5 year period. In essence for every dollar you pay for licensing you are paying 2.8x more dollars in professional service fees over the course of 5 years. I can’t think of a worse total cost of ownership (TCO) in my 25 year career. Automation needs to advance the business and deliver efficiency, but not at the expense of fiscal responsibility.
The Future is Now!
Instead, let’s take an illustrative example from Opnova. I will show you a quick but meaningful automation that I was able to put together in under 5 minutes with the business objective of cost savings on our SaaS subscriptions. The entire automation was created using simple English language instructions and absolutely zero expertise in any specific programming language or if-this-then-that style decision trees. Just plain simple instructions that you would give to an intern or a new hire.
Opnova's task workflow editor.
Once I did a couple test runs, I was able to release this automation to production in under 20 minutes. From now on, it will run at the end of every month and reclaim expensive “Design Seat” licenses from inactive Figma users. And if Figma changes the UI, it will adapt to it. Simple, fast and tremendously effective!
The Archaic Past
Now let’s take a look at a couple of legacy alternatives and their “robot studio” user interfaces (UI) that hail back from a different era in user experience (UX) sensibilities which were effectively absent. These vendors simply did not care to make it easy for the practitioners since there are a long list of certifications they want to sell to you.
Legacy example 1.
Legacy example 2.
Take a minute and imagine yourself trying to achieve the same exact Figma licensing automation in any one of these incumbent solutions. Let’s be honest, you wouldn’t even try and that would be totally understandable. As the CEO of a venture-backed startup albeit with prior technical experience, I would not have tried either. It is simply too complicated to even understand the layout of legacy tooling, nevermind implementing actual automations. My job is to advance my business, look for efficiencies and productivity improvements while keeping a keen eye on provable ROI and fiscal responsibility. The hidden cost of implementing and maintaining these tools would certainly fail the latter part of my charter.
Mission: Citizen Automation
At Opnova, we are on a mission to eliminate the monotonous, tedious and repetitive work that we all hate yet have to do day in and day out because we must. We believe this can now be achieved with tooling that is accessible and usable by everybody. Some call this “democratization of automation”. Whether the marketing jargon appeals to you or not, we are here to help you automate away your work’s mundane and repetitive tasks with you at the helm and with absolutely zero requirements for certification and training. Come, check us out!
Cheers,
Sinan Eren
Co-Founder/CEO
