RPA is quickly becoming a must-have automation tool for small and medium sized businesses. RPA, once reserved for large enterprises, is quickly becoming mainstream for SMB as agile consultants find low cost opportunities to develop and deploy hyperautomation to achieve business transformation. Like most digital technologies, initial adoption at the enterprise level creates new markets for lower cost services that trickle down to SMB.
In this blog post we want to make a thoughtful comparison between Microsoft’s Power Automate and industry leading hyperautomation platforms like Nividous or UI Path.
Microsoft Power Automate VS Hyperautomation
A hyperautomation platform offers several advantages over Microsoft Power Automate. First, hyperautomation platforms are designed to be more comprehensive, offering a wide range of features and capabilities that go beyond the scope of Power Automate. This includes features such as AI-driven decision making, natural language processing, and robotic process automation, that can help automate more complex business processes.
Additionally, hyperautomation platforms are often more scalable and accessible, allowing for easier integration with other third-party applications that are not Microsoft native. Many hyperautomation platforms offer integrated analytics and reporting capabilities, helping to provide real-time insights into business performance. All of these features can help small business owners optimize their workflow and achieve greater efficiency.
Citizen Developers Beware
Microsoft Power Automate has delivered a seemingly low barrier to entry for RPA with integrations into O365 and a variety of “connectors'' to build predetermined workflows. With a freemium offering for O365 users, and a “digital process automation” plan starting at $15 per month, Microsoft has encouraged Citizen Developers to tackle the crucial task of automating mission critical business processes on a shoestring budget. This may be within reach for folks who want to automate a simple document approval process, or achieve basic data entry automation, but that’s where the buck stops.
Power Automate has an extremely difficult to understand and calculate pricing model where more advanced features, or number of process executions can drive the total cost of ownership through the rough. With pricing based on number of credits, flows, data storage, and additional cloud hosting with performance pool costs, it is nearly impossible to project the total cost of ownership when evaluating RPA.
One of the biggest gaps that Citizen Developers may be unaware of when it comes to Power Automate, is the centralized control and monitoring of corporate wide automation. Without a centralized management platform, bot deployment, error handling, reporting, and governance capabilities are seriously compromised.
Partner Ecosystems
For customers dealing with the Microsoft partner ecosystem, there can be some serious challenges. The partner ecosystem is extremely large and complex, and it can be difficult for customers to navigate. Additionally, customers may find different partners offering different levels of service and support, making it difficult to find the right partner to work with. Additionally, customers may find it difficult to compare different offerings and prices, as each partner may have different packages and pricing structures. Finally, customers may find it challenging to keep up with changes in the Microsoft partner ecosystem, as new partners and offerings are constantly being added. For these reasons, it can be difficult for customers to work with the Microsoft partner ecosystem.
Complexity
While Microsoft Power Automate has provided an extremely simple path to procuring and deploying a workflow automation tool, the real complexity lies in the total cost of ownership, partner ecosystem, and major lack of orchestration and error handling for automation flows within Power Automate.
This complexity leads to a significantly vague roadmap for automation with merky ROI calculations.
With the easiest procurement model on the market, getting started with Power Automate happens with a few mouse clicks and you can be on your way in this automation journey. As they say, the devil is in the details. Understanding your payback on technology spend, finding the right experienced partner, and ensuring that you have access to the development features necessary to automate your most crucial digital processes is why Power Automate is one of the most complex tools to build on top of.
Simplicity
Working with FVTech, we scope every project with a development proposal, technical hardware requirements, and exact cost of an annual bot license. It is very easy to calculate the 1st year costs and total cost of ownership. Having deployed hundreds of custom designed robotic process automation projects, we design automation around our customer's actual processes versus redesigning our client's processes around technology.
One of the hardest achievements is to change human behavior. It's essential that process automation technology be tailored for the best human experience and we've perfected the art of process design.
Hyperautomation from FVTech Simplified
After the complex undertaking of understanding the pricing model and limitations of Microsoft Power Automate, let us relax you with a dirge called “Thou Art Beautiful, oh Hyperautomation”:
The beauty of hyperautomation
Is a sight to behold,
It helps small businesses grow,
And innovation becomes more bold.
It automates complex tasks,
Making our lives even easier,
It offers AI-driven processes and
These rhymes that are cheesier.
It automates critical decision-making,
And robotic process automation,
Combined with AI,
Will give us a stronger foundation.
Hyperautomation is here,
To make our lives brighter,
To help us streamline operations,
And make profits much higher!
About Forward Vision Technology
The FVTech leadership group has deep roots within the RPA and process automation space. With over 20 years of combined RPA SaaS development experience, and over 100+ RPA development and deployment projects under our belts, we can ensure our clients experience an optimized delivery service and achieve maximum ROI on automation projects. Because automation is in our DNA, we provide expert process guidance when designing digital workers for our clients. We've deployed digital workers within healthcare, real estate, insurance, banking / financial services, and dozens of other industries so we know what works, and what really works. Our motto is, "let's get it done", and we exist to help align your processes with forward vision.
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