#18 Interviewing RPA Industry Leaders and Practitioners – Cristian Ignat

I have Cristian Ignat with us to share his thoughts on the Robotic Process Automation adoption.

It’s my pleasure to have him here and would like to thank him for sharing his perspective 🙂

Here is a short Bio:

Cristian Ignat is the Founder & CEO of Aggranda, a boutique RPA company with the headquarter in Romania with clients across Europe.

When he doesn’t work, he enjoys going to theater and legos 🙂


Small Talk


Sharath Raju:
We would like to know about your digital transformation journey?
Cristian Ignat:
I am a programmer at the root. During university, I was a freelancer and worked for a lot of clients from the US market. In this period I was forced to learn how to sell my services and market myself to face the low prices. In my second year of faculty, I built an outsourcing company with a partner from the UK. After 6 years I exited this company and built 2 performance marketing agencies that got in the top 3 in Romania, Canopy being one of them. At Canopy we discovered UiPath, being one of our clients for about 2 years. We built a pilot project under Canopy and this way Rosy was born, our first software robot.

In January last year, we separated the RPA services from Canopy, making a new brand, Aggranda. During this time we have developed software robots that are saving more than 3,000 hours every month to our clients.


Sharath Raju:
What are the 3 biggest mistakes to avoid, when someone starts their RPA journey?
Cristian Ignat:
I think all the biggest 3 mistakes are all related to selecting the right process.

Choosing the right processes is the biggest mistake that anyone can make. When you are at the beginning of your RPA journey, you are tempted to take any projects for any money. The biggest mistake you can do is to take try to automate processes that are not made for RPA. Been there, done that, learned so much 🙂

The second lesson is that you should spend as much time as possible in the Analysis phase. On the first projects you might say that it’s a simple project, it doesn’t have too many exceptions, everything is great. At the moment we are spending half of our time analyzing and documenting the project (PDD) and a half on developing. 

Last but not least, build a strong and good relationship with the IT department. The projects that are not supported by the IT department are very hard to advance. You need to spend time with them, assure them that you are compliant with their policy and show the impact of the RPA implementation at the organization level.


Sharath Raju:
One of the best accomplishments that you can share with us which can inspire RPA enthusiasts?
Cristian Ignat:
I think each RPA solution finalized by us is a unique accomplishment. The moment when you see the team running the robot for the very first time and their enthusiasm is priceless.

I think you should always have this moment in mind when you are working on the RPA project 🙂


Sharath Raju:
What are the industries where we might see the biggest impact of RPA in 2020?
Cristian Ignat:
I think finance & accounting + HR will continue to remain the most important departments. Retail and manufacturing will probably have the highest growth in RPA for 2020.


Sharath Raju:
We would like to hear about the future of RPA from you…
Cristian Ignat:
I think that 2020 will be the year of Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Process Automation. We will see a huge maturity this year and RPA will be mandatory in any digital transformation project.


You can connect with Cristian Ignat, he is always happy to help 🙂
Click here to connect with him on LinkedIn

I hope you enjoyed the post!!!

And if you think you or your management has some thoughts on RPA that you would like to share with the hundreds and thousands of people out there and be helpful…
Let’s have a small talk 🙂  

Connect with me on LinkedIn or you can email me at sharathkumarraju@gmail.com


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