Redwood Software Launches Robotic Licensing For More Transparent Supply Chain Pricing

Redwood Software, a global “robotic enterprise” company specializing in supply chain efficiency, announced the launching of a new licensing model billing managers for only the services they consume.

Available now, this new licensing model permits supply chain managers to directly compare the costs of manual work against processes that are robotized.

According to spokesmen, Redwood only charges for the delivery of a robotic service, equivalent to a unit of work that can done by a person (send an email, download a report, reconcile two reports etc.). Redwood delivers a catalogue of 35,000 of these ready built robotic services that can be linked together by supply chain managers in a visual plug and play interface.

End-to-end business processes can be modelled, robotized, tested and deployed without cost and risk, spokesmen added.

The announcement coincides with a recent study issued by The Hackett Group, which maintains that robotic process automation (RPA) has become a dominant theme of back-office performance improvement, but involves a significant “learning curve.”

The consultancy allows, however, that while adoption of RPA remains low, functional executives expect it to increase significantly in the near term.

Neil Kinson, chief of staff of Redwood Software, told SCMR in an interview that many companies don't fully understand the real level of involvement required when it comes to RPA.

“There are different types of skills and costs that need to be factored in. Starting off with a small pilot is very different to when it comes to scaling RPA across an organization,” he said.

Kinson added that the increased need for enterprises to establish development teams and centers of excellence to solely manage bots and handle exceptions is negating some of the value companies are attempting to achieve with robotics in the first place. But the ‘'learning curve' doesn't need to be that hard.

“When thinking about robotics, companies need to decide whether they really want to concentrate on developing bots or focus on continually improving their supply chain processes,” he said. “Early stage RPA tools have started from the bot development angle while more mature robotic solutions understood that this would soon become a barrier to success.”

Within the Robotic Service Charge, Redwood provides the full lifecycle support for all the robots in the catalogue, eliminating the issue that other solutions find, where any savings are eroded or eliminated by the on-going maintenance. With this approach, customers can focus on achieving higher levels of automation and process improvement rather than providing maintenance for bots they have to build themselves.

All desktop Robotic Process Automation (RPA) licensing models leave supply chain managers with the responsibility of having to guess how many bots they need at the beginning of a project and what that return can give them. And while many providers promise bots will deliver savings – some claiming the equivalent of two-three full-time employees – evidence of this is unsubstantiated.

Dennis Walsh, President of Americas and APAC at Redwood, said, “There is no exact formula to know how many bots an organization needs to service a specific business process. Often, organizations are left with empty promises of full automation, and even more manual work to simply maintain and manage the influx of bots their vendor has deployed.”

SC
MR