RPA Consulting
RPA consulting
Software robots that operate a computer screen — useful in one narrow case, and honest about all the others.
The problem
Your accounts team opens the same government portal every morning, logs in, navigates to the same screen, and copies ten numbers into a sheet. The portal was built a decade ago and has no export button, no API, and a vendor who stopped answering emails. Meanwhile, the same team is looking at quotes for RPA — robotic process automation — which promises to teach software to click through that screen exactly as a person would. That promise is real, and it does work, but there is a warning that most vendors skip. A robot that clicks through a screen breaks the moment the screen changes. A button moves, a loading spinner lingers half a second longer, a session times out in a new way — and the robot stops, silently or noisily, and someone has to notice. If your software has any usable connection point — a file export, a database, an email it sends — a simpler integration is almost always the better answer. RPA is the right tool in one genuine case: old software with no connection point at all, where replacing the software is not on the table.
Old software that cannot be connected any other way gets automated, with a human watching closely.
Built for: Teams stuck on legacy software that has no export, no API, and no vendor who will add one.
What we deliver
Honest fit assessment first. We look at your software before recommending anything. If a file export or a direct connection will do the job, we say so and scope that instead — it will cost less and break less often.
Robot design for the exception. When RPA is genuinely the right answer, we design the robot to be brittle-aware — it checks its own output, flags when something looks different, and stops rather than continuing wrong.
Supervised operation. An unmonitored robot is a liability. We build in daily checks and alerts so a screen change gets noticed before it has been silently failing for a week.
Exit planning. If the underlying software ever does get an API or a replacement, we design the robot so switching away from it is a clean decision, not a rebuild from scratch.
More in Business Automation
Customer support deflection
Most repeat tickets never reach a person.
Business process automation
Hours of typing become a review step.
Business Process Automation
The slow middle of your process runs on its own.
Not sure which of these fits? See the whole business automation practice, or read what we build for your industry.
Tell us what’s slow.
Describe the job eating your team’s day. We’ll tell you straight whether an agent is the right fix — and if it isn’t, we’ll say so.
Frequently asked questions
- What is RPA, in plain terms?
- RPA stands for robotic process automation. It means software that opens a program, moves a mouse pointer to buttons, clicks them, reads what appears on screen, and types into fields — the same actions a person takes, automated. It is not a robot in a factory; it is software imitating someone sitting at a computer.
- We have already been quoted by an RPA vendor. Should we just go ahead?
- Before you commit, ask the vendor what happens when the screen changes and who pays to fix the robot when it does. Maintenance cost is where RPA projects usually surprise people. If the answer is a monthly fee plus a per-incident charge with no ceiling, that context belongs in the decision.
- How often do these robots actually break?
- It depends entirely on how stable the software is. A portal that a government agency updates irregularly will break a robot more often than internal software your own IT team controls. We measure the update frequency of your target software during the assessment, because that number determines the true long-term cost.