CoSourcing Partners: Your Strategic RPA Partner

Scott Upp, President & CEO

2018 marked the seventh year of operational growth for CoSourcing Partners as a national robotic process automation and IT services company. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, CoSourcing Partners is a certified small business that delivers cost-effective RPA solutions to Fortune 2000 companies in healthcare, banking, insurance, financial services, telecom, and consumer packaged goods industries. Over time, CoSourcing Partners has grown in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) space and today develops automated processes which transform its clients’ automation vision into cost-effective solutions. The company’s RPA solution includes automation opportunity identification training, conducting automation opportunity assessments (determining the development time and savings of each opportunity), full-scale development, and staff augmentation. CoSourcing Partners also provides consultation for developing a Center of Excellence (CoE) for the RPA operations of their clients.

To deliver the solutions in a customer-oriented manner, Scott Upp, the President & CEO of CoSourcing Partners has been playing a pivotal role along with Rita Brunk, Executive Vice President of Robotic Process Automation of CoSourcing Partners. They provide high-performance teams to meet the clients’ RPA assessment and implementation-related needs, as well as train and mentor employees within a client’s COE team. Following are the insights shared by the executive team on the prowess that CoSourcing Partners has garnered in the RPA landscape by adopting a customer specific approach to deliver quality solutions, expert consulting, and staff augmentation together while partnering with companies to automate their business processes.

Could you brief us about the pain points that your clients face today with regards to RPA?

‘False Starts’—that’s one of the biggest problems we solve.

We are a software agnostic services company, and we have noticed one major problem, which still prevails in the industry. Although the software vendors help companies initiate a proof of concept (POC), they don’t train the clients to identify significant opportunities and transform those ideas into a more cost-effective business processes post-automation. We refer to the situation as a false start, and this is where we come in and help address the problem. First, we train the client’s team on how to identify an automation opportunity virtually. Next, we perform a five-day assessment on site. The following week offsite, we evaluate each opportunity from the perspective of development time, cost, savings, and overall impact on the company. Approximately fourteen days from the start of the onsite visit, we are delivering to the client an opportunity evaluation for up to twenty automation including process optimization suggestions, business cases for each, and finally, a strategic plan for completing the automation to best optimize their financial impact to the company. Pre/ post-automation, we also train the client on how to measure success via operational metrics.

The onsite visit includes leadership, process experts, and those on the ground performing the functions. We dedicate ninety-minute meetings for each opportunity evaluated. During the sessions, we not only look at the time they take to automate but also consider the scope for optimizing it at the same time by putting together high-level business cases. We also determine the systems utilized and paths that we need to take, quantifying development time in terms of low, medium, and high complexity. Lastly, based on the business cases, we prioritize the opportunities, ultimately benefiting clients from the highest to the lowest ROI.

Rita Brunk, Executive Vice President of Robotic Process Automation

Following the assessment, the clients are presented with multiple actionable documents to help them automate their different processes.

Another area of challenge regarding companies new to RPA is the notion of a Center of Excellence. Do they build a team or buy a team? Again, the RPA software companies oversell the simplicity of the software and thus companies are motivated to build their own Center of Excellence with the misconception that being certified on the software is all it takes. This is not true, and they tend to make significant up-front investments in this type of team only to flounder. We can assist businesses in building their own Center of Excellence (CoE) in 21 calendar days to provide the required knowledge and RPA expertise.

CoSourcing Partners will partner with you to set your automation initiative up for success resulting in significant savings in an optimal timeframe

Please tell us about CoSourcing Partners’ RPA staff augmentation services and the benefits they assure to your clientele.

While we encourage our clients to develop a CoE if they are a $500M annual revenue size company or larger, we also augment the abilities of their staff by training them to fill the knowledge gaps as our team develops alongside their team. This is one of our differentiators. Our RPA Staff Augmentation Program is designed to supplement the clients’ internal team with the expert knowledge of assessing, developing, deploying, and governing their RPA solutions. As a full-suite RPA solutions provider, our mission is to endow clients with the tools and skills necessary for their enterprise to handle the technological investments in-house. This thought leadership has accelerated the project timelines by 50 percent. Our competitors want to do the entire development, whereas we want to partner with the client to do what is best for them.

Being an IT augmentation business, how has CoSourcing Partners gradually transformed into an RPA solution vendor?

We started out as an IT augmentation specializing in business transformation and progressed toward providing RPA as one of our large healthcare clients wanted to implement this capability to reduce their operational expenses. We helped them start implementing RPA and are at present working with them to develop their Center of Excellence. They currently have more than 25 robots in production.

Over the past few years, there have been many examples where our RPA services have stood the test of clients, one example being of a large food manufacturing company. The firm wanted to slash their software development costs by building a self-owned automation team. They thought that this would solve every predicament once they had their employees trained on the specific RPA software —a ‘false start.’ What they lacked was automation experience, and that’s where we came in. In addition, we learned that some of their projects, due to this lack of experience, were behind schedule and they didn’t re-use the code where ever possible, resulting in siloed, inefficient operations. We then provided them with our experienced resources to address these issues.

How has 2018 been for CoSourcing Partners? Also, tell us about the company’s key focus areas for the near future.

Perpetual movement, perseverance, learning every day by listening to the customers, and providing them with solutions customized for their workflows are the factors that have laid the success path for us in the last 12 months. In the past few months alone, we have gained exponential growth in the RPA landscape, and we will be building on this success going ahead.

From a technological perspective, RPA is gaining immense traction as companies are developing an understanding of the overall savings RPA can deliver. We will use this as a stepping stone and enhance our RPA services by infusing them with cognitive and machine learning as well.

Further, the early adopters of RPA such as those in the financial and healthcare sectors are now looking for a second automation product to address their unmet needs. This will bring more opportunities for us to advise them in their endeavors. In addition, we will be moving from an independent to a strategic delivery model by continuing to scale the business according to the market demands.