Robotic Process Automations

Predictive Support & Maintenance at Scale

Lack of well-planned support and maintenance activities cause over 50% of RPA projects to fail. Health of digital bots is of high priority in many large-scale bot deployments, and Infosys BPM has developed the monitoring tool called EAGLE to address the challenges.

• Robotic process automation (RPA) projects require very meticulously planned support and maintenance activities.
• As the digital workforce is increasing rapidly and exponentially, a scalable, robust, and strategic approach is needed for maintenance.
• Key aspects of maintenance and support are: proactiveness, predictiveness, precision, resilience, agility, and compliance.

Podcast Audio Transcript

Alisha: Welcome everybody, this is Alisha. You are listening to the latest podcast from us at Infosys BPM, and today’s topic is “Optimum predictive support and maintenance at scale”. To talk about this in depth, we have with us Gopal Kulkarni, Head of Technology Solutions Group here at Infosys BPM. Welcome, Gopal, and thank you so much for joining us.

Gopal: Thank you. Glad to be here again.

Alisha: Our last podcast has been quite a success. Lots of likes and shares. Looking forward to another informative conversation today.

Gopal: That’s wonderful. I hope this one will be even more exciting.

Alisha: Awesome! Last time we spoke on automation. Today, we are discussing another key topic: support and maintenance. Can you please tell us more about the strategic importance of this?

Gopal: Sure. According to analysts, 50% of RPA projects fail to meet their objectives and the biggest reason is unplanned support and maintenance needed for in-production BOTs.

Ill planned maintenance will result in constant break-fix cycles that require bots to be pulled out of production. This massively increases maintenance costs that keep them away from delivering on expected ROI. Ultimately, these break-fix cycles inhibit the broader business objectives that RPA was meant to drive, like improving efficiency, increasing speed of processes, optimising costs and improving process quality.

Hence, being Proactive and Predictive about the health of digital Bots and overall infrastructure is important.

Another aspect is scale. With tremendous focus on Digital Transformation, the Digital workforce is increasing rapidly and exponentially.

Hence, to me a robust Support and Maintenance at scale is strategically very important.

As they say – “The secret of landscapes is in Maintenance and not in its creation”.

Alisha: Quite an interesting insight. That’s a tremendous growth Gopal , what do you think are the key aspects of Support and Maintenance?

Gopal: Yes, indeed!

Regarding a robust support and maintenance at scale, you need to consider four key aspects:

• Being Proactive and Predictive to ensure maximum up time.
• Precision and Efficiency to have better MTTR and higher MTBF
• Resilient and Agile Technology and processes for enhanced customer experience
• Control and Compliance to adequately address the technology security aspects

We have large portfolio accounts under maintenance and needed a solution that could analyse dynamics of every implementation.

We also believe that building a strong Level 1 Technical Support team is key to any tech support and maintenance organization. It has two benefits: A good first level support saves on service delivery costs and time, and allows the next level to handle more critical issues.

With these in mind, we developed an In-house monitoring tool, which is intuitive, proactive and predictive. We call it “EAGLE” and as its name suggests, has an EAGLE eye to trigger the alerts. This monitoring tool is integrated with our service desk to further ensure proper closure of all alerts.

It is easy to configure, and does round-the-clock monitoring and alerts via Service desk. This helped us reduce the support cost by 30% and meet SLA adherence of > 98%.

Automation Nerve Centre is our visual dashboard with data from multiple sources, like databases, log files, Mailboxes, locally hosted files, and web services. It displays real time information and highlights list of actions to the level 1 support team.

With all these interventions, our level 1 support team is enabled to address 90% of the alerts. 

Alisha: So, the EAGLE has indeed landed! Could you enlighten us on the technology strategy for support and maintenance?

Gopal: Most of the support and maintenance groups would have to deal with Digital workers with a bouquet of technologies, which can include web-based technologies, custom solutions, a range of RPA platforms, or even simple automation, like macros. We will have to monitor the functioning of Bots and infra at account level as well as at enterprise level, in some situations both upstream (client) and downstream (managed services) for a given account.

Strategy is to derive a solution to encompass all of the above. They can differ in specifics.

For e.g., for being Proactive and Predictive, we need to be monitoring error logs. Exact reading of logs and actions taken could vary with each technology. That is where an easily configurable tool comes handy.

Alisha: Yes, configuration is definitely key. How has Infosys BPM grown in the support & maintenance area?

Gopal: We started our journey as a ticket-based service. As our portfolio started expanding, we realized that we need to be proactive in handling issues. We spent effort in analysing and fixing the root cause of the reported issues. Soon, we enhanced in-house tools to make issues predictable. Our overall goal was to enhance Customer experience.

Our journey has been from being Reactive to Proactive to Predictive.

As they say taste of the pudding is in eating, our stakeholder satisfaction went up by 20%.

One of our customers who has been part of our entire journey wanted some of our service desk reports to be extended to their IT.

Alisha: That’s wonderful to hear! So, what’s next in your journey?

Gopal: Now that we are able to provide stable and superior services to our customers, our next plan is to establish a COE for Support and Maintenance. By doing so, we can attain and sustain world-class performance and value with respect to Support and Maintenance.

Not to forget our emphasize on empathy and amplifying human potential, as part of Humanware enablement we are training our non technology resources to take up L1 support. The process knowledge coupled with technology training equips them to deliver this role quite effectively.

Alisha: That’s great, and I am sure you will set it up soon. And in terms of efficiency, what kind of improvements have you noticed?

Gopal: We have been constantly innovating and evolving with newer concepts. Our proactive monitoring tools have reduced tickets by about 40%.

We introduced a new concept of “Level 1.5”, where we could pass on many of the Level 2 activities to Level 1, through training. With this, we could achieve efficiency of almost 30%.

All of the above turned one of our clients from being a detractor to a promoter. They now want us to implement our tools for their new subsidiary. This is a true testimony of improving the level of trust and enhanced customer experience!

Alisha: Sounds like you nailed it, in technology support & maintenance! Gopal, today’s talk has been very insightful. Thank you so much for your time. I am sure our audience has thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today.

Gopal: Thank you so much. It was indeed great to be back here.

Alisha: Dear listeners, thank you for tuning in to today’s podcast. It will be available on various platforms like Spotify and Google Podcasts, apart from our company website. As always, do encourage us by liking and sharing this podcast on social media. Our social handles are mentioned in the podcast page. Also, if you have any queries, do reach out to us through the email address on the podcast description. Until we are back with our next podcast, it’s adios from us. Stay safe & healthy!