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What Made Robocorp a Strategic Partner of Emerson in Its Digital Transformation Journey

by Ant Sh
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What Made Robocorp a Strategic Partner of Emerson in Its Digital Transformation Journey

Emerson Electric Co. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Ferguson, Missouri. The Fortune 500 company manufactures products and provides engineering services for industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. The company was an early adopter of Gen1* RPA in the industrial sector and built hundreds of automations as part of its digital transformation journey. But when inflexible architectures and licensing models constrained their ability to automate mission-critical processes and meet their internal SLAs (service-level agreements), Emerson turned to Robocorp.

CHALLENGE

Emerson chose a Gen1 RPA provider years ago as their RPA platform and automated a wide variety of mission-critical processes, including finance operations, complex order management, and supply chain processes with tight SLAs. One such automation released customer orders which involved collecting files from SharePoint that had to be processed through multiple screens within their Oracle Enterprise Business Suite (EBS) ERP. Although the automation was complex, the business required all files to be processed within 5 hours. If the bots could not complete the job in time, customer orders would be delayed, and/or customers would be quoted wrong lead times.

This resulted in constantly juggling workloads and adopting a third-party bot scheduling platform to address the problem. But in the end, Emerson was still faced with adding a significant amount of capacity to their Gen1 system in the form of licenses and infrastructure, but knew that those assets would sit unused during non-peak times.

SOLUTION

With the help of an advisor, Emerson surveyed the RPA landscape for traditional and open-source options. With a robust Python-based open-source framework for building bots, the ability to scale automations up and down on-demand via cloud-based orchestration, and a simple consumption-based pricing model, Robocorp became Emerson’s partner of choice. Working with Robocorp, Emerson can run 16+ sessions on one server and has achieved 100% adherence to the SLA. Their Gen1 environment would require 16 servers and 16 licenses, which increases maintenance costs and adversely impacts the ROI.

When converting the Gen1 bots to Robocorp, several members of Emerson’s automation team had programming experience. Still, most were primarily familiar with UI-based drag-and-drop automation tools. In a short time, they were able to become proficient in Robocorp’s ability to automate at all levels of the application stack, including UI, locators, UI elements, API, data, etc., as well as the ability to dynamically scale workloads up and down, and quickly became self-sufficient due to the power of the Python ecosystem and accessibility of Robot Framework’s human-readable syntax.

After a few short sessions with Robocorp’s onboarding team and 24/7 support tools, the Emerson automation team built dynamic digital workers leveraging existing objects from Robot Framework, such as the RPA Java Access Bridge library, and new keywords using Python. They were able to migrate high-consuming Gen1 bots quickly and create new automations leveraging reusable objects.

RESULTS

Emerson’s internal stakeholders are happier, rework has been virtually eliminated, and they no longer need bolt-on applications for orchestration.

  • 100% SLA compliance – less downtime
  • 75% reduction in infrastructure
  • 72% faster processing
  • Faster bot creation with cloneable code and templatized bot libraries
  • Infinite flexibility and scalability – adjustable as needed *According to Robocorp, Gen1 RPA tools offer old pricing structures, less flexibility, and worse integrations than Gen2.

*According to Robocorp, Gen1 RPA tools offer old pricing structures, less flexibility, and worse integrations than Gen2.

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