How is Virtusa helping companies scale RPA?

Often, organisations will deploy an RPA solution in one department. But, they often hit a wall if there is a desire to scale RPA.

When we said we were going to do more case studies on organisations, beginning with IGEL making waves in the end user computing market, we weren’t lying.

In this article, we’re going to explore how Virtusa — the digital business technology provider — is helping organisations scale robotic process automation (RPA) across entire businesses, while delving into their USP.

The USP

Virtusa aims to help clients achieve their digital goals — “this is what makes us unique,” says Ravi Palepu — global head of telco solutions.

He claims that other providers support clients in the digital transformation process simply by identifying an issue and implementing a digital solution – automating any manual process with RPA, for example. “We take a more holistic view,” Palepu says. “We provide end-to-end support for clients, assessing their existing operations and capabilities to help them identify their digital goals and create a roadmap to get them there.

“We also differentiate based on our approach to prototyping — we provide clients with a low-risk, low-investment ‘sandbox’ environment to help narrow down their problem areas and create a realistic prototype of the right solution.”

Related: RPA: the key players, and what’s unique about them – We sat down with some of the key players in RPA: Automation Anywhere, NICE, UiPath, Blue Prism, Kofax, and Another Monday; to ask: ‘what’s special about you’?

Relevant to my organisation?

Virtusa’s classic customer is a large enterprise looking to embark on or extend the digital transformation process.

In today’s uber-competitive environment, many large – perhaps more traditional – firms are finding “themselves under serious pressure to build digital capabilities, but face a number of challenges in doing so,” continues Palepu.

The majority of organisations face the same problem: IT departments are to focused on ‘keeping the lights on’ to consider digital transformation.

Related: Desktop-as-a-Service and the future of IT working for digital transformation – Embracing Desktop-as-a-Service, and other cloud-based services, will free up IT teams to focus on the digital transformation demands being placed on them.

Further to this, Palepu highlights “that the complexity of existing IT operation holds them back from implementing digital processes, or they may not have the internal experience of running large digital transformation projects.”

Overcoming these IT transformation hurdles is “Virtusa’s ‘sweet spot’,” claims Palepu. “We help these firms re-imagine their existing business models and give them a roadmap to digital transformation. We have run so many of these projects that we know where the most common mistakes are made and how to avoid them.”

See also: Scaling RPA: before automating processes, improve them – Most enterprises aren’t scaling RPA across their entire organisation, in part, because they don’t understand their processes to begin with.

Scaling RPA

How does Virtusa help organisations scale RPA across their business?

Palepu tells Information Age that “we offer a range of services to guide clients at every stage of the process — from identifying use cases, through to building their CoE (centre of excellence), through to deployment and ongoing support.”

The provider’s strength lies in the fact that it is a business consultant, as well as a software engineer expert. As a result, Virtusa can talk to companies about their business objectives and then show where technology can help — and also show them, in some cases, where RPA might not be the right solution.

“Our goal is to ensure our clients build an ROI-driven strategy, unlocking the skills and capacity for RPA and establishing an effective model for governing it,” says Palepu.

From a technology perspective, Virtusa have also developed a series of domain and process-specific accelerators to help increase time to value for businesses investing in RPA.

One example would be it’s Smart Document Processing (V-SDP) solution, which digitises scanned invoices, contracts and bills from multiple sources and formats. This enables “seamless reconciliation of the accounts payable process, data extraction from various fields, and advice on the next-best-action, with minimal human intervention,” according to Palepu.

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Nick Ismail

Nick Ismail is a former editor for Information Age (from 2018 to 2022) before moving on to become Global Head of Brand Journalism at HCLTech. He has a particular interest in smart technologies, AI and...