#6 Interviewing RPA Industry Leaders and Practitioners – John P. Grancarich

John Grancarich is the VP of Product Strategy at HelpSystems, a leader in providing infrastructure software solutions for over 17,000 companies worldwide.

In this role, he focuses on product strategy development & implementation, product management and product marketing. HelpSystems offers a broad portfolio of automation solutions which includes RPA, workload automation, and business process automation.

Small Talk

Sharath Raju:
What would be the starting point for RPA implementation in a company?

John P. Grancarich:
I realize the obvious answer here starts with technology, but I don’t think that’s where you start for a successful implementation.

I think the best implementations start with a partnership between the RPA solution provider and a champion at the company working together to implement a different way of thinking about how to build a stronger business and create happier customers.

That’s the first -“implementation” that needs to happen – a new mindset has to be planted like a seed. Focus on what you want to achieve, understand what’s possible, and then outline a plan for how you want to get there- that’s the foundation that needs to be implemented.

Sharath Raju:
What is the biggest mistake that we end up doing while adopting RPA?

John P. Grancarich:
I’m a big believer in creating some early wins to show what’s possible, but a big mistake is using the early wins as the end result when they’re really just the foundation to build something bigger.

The transformative potential of RPA comes from scaling it across a business. Literally every week I’m amazed by what our customers and partners are accomplishing with our product – I like to dream big, so when their stories are making me sit back in amazement that’s saying something.

So for me the biggest mistake is underestimating its potential to transform how a business operates. Keep those early wins in perspective and build on top of them.

Sharath Raju:
How can an organization benefit by adopting RPA in terms of ROI, Efficiency and Error rate?

John P. Grancarich:
There are obviously a variety of key performance indicators a company can use to measure the benefit of RPA, but we try to keep things as simple as possible and start with a simple idea: for every $1 you invest in RPA you should be able to get at least $5 back in the form of hard cost savings, improved efficiency or reduced errors.

The key words here are “at least” when we first started this messaging with the market I think some people doubted what we were saying. Now we’re starting to see some eye popping returns on RPA so we use the 5x goal as a way to establish a baseline return to challenge ourselves to achieve, but the actual return is often much higher than 5x.

Now customers are pushing us to get to 10x and even 20x returns with RPA, and it’s been really fun to push the boundaries on this to see what’s possible. This approach also gives us the flexibility to work with a customer in a more consultative way up front to define which measurements are most important to them and then we figure out how to achieve it.

Sharath Raju:
How important is analytics in RPA?

John P. Grancarich:
I don’t think you can scale without good analytics, and scaling is the ultimate goal if you want to transform the business. You need to be able to multiply what a single employee – technical, non-technical, it doesn’t matter – can accomplish so that you’re turning them into an army of one. Without analytics that brings together the key indicators in a simple to use view it’s going to be really tough to accomplish that.