Top 3 Issues MSPs Solve With RPA in 2024

A survey revealed that 45% of businesses are planning on partnering with managed service providers, especially for IT functionalities, in order to improve the quality of their processes and cut operational costs. Moreover, the MSP market is estimated to grow from ~152B in 2020 to ~275B by 2026. With the increasing demand for their services, managed service providers are struggling to keep their costs down while maintaining efficiency and productivity.

MSPs (Managed Service Providers) leverage RPA in 2 ways:

• Offer it as a service to their customers and automate their processes, unlocking a new revenue pool. We cover this under RPA Managed Services.
• Automate their own processes. This leads to reducing costs and providing high-quality services as it enables the automation of numerous mundane processes and eliminates human error. This is the focus of this article.

What are the challenges that MSPs face, and how can RPA tackle them?

Challenges that MSPs face differ according to the type of service they provide, however, most MSPs face the following issues:

1. Pricing

Challenge: Businesses expect MSPs to provide lower costs in comparison to building in-house tech teams or training employees on software and tools. In order to maintain clients, MSPs may find it difficult to elevate their prices, thus limiting their profits.

Solution: Gartner estimates that an RPA bot costs 1/3 of an offshore employee and 1/5 of an onshore employee. Therefore, leveraging an RPA bot to perform repetitive tasks can significantly decrease MSP costs, and enable them to keep their prices competitive.

2. Data privacy

Challenge: With the rising number of cybersecurity attacks and data breaches, businesses are hesitant towards sharing their data with third-parties as they believe that it increases their risk of exposing their data.

Solution: Relying on RPA bots to perform data processing and manipulation decreases the risk of exposing sensitive business data to unauthorized people. Additionally, RPA bots can mitigate cybersecurity risks by running cyber threat hunts and penetration tests, as well as updating software and downloading system patches.

3. Time-zone differences

Challenge: Businesses that partner with MSPs may be located in different countries and time zones, thus, making communication difficult due to different working hours.

Solution: RPA bots are capable of running 24/7 and automating rule-based communications with clients and customers, thus, tackling time difference issues.

What can MSPs automate with RPA?

RPA bots use screen scraping and OCR to replicate human interactions with UI elements in order to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks such as data processing, bills and invoices, reporting, and numerous back-office operations. Therefore, MSPs can use RPA bots to automate their and their clients’ processes in:

Client onboarding

RPA bots can automate most client onboarding processes, such as:

• Updating CRM system with client information by scanning their contracts and documents
• Verifying client information by cross checking different online and offline sources (e.g. company website, payment documents)
• Sending welcome emails and additional entry information

Managing rule-based IT tasks

IT MSPs provide services such as data centers, cloud infrastructure, web/software development, and IT security management. RPA bots can automate numerous rule-based IT processes for MSP clients, such as:

• Resetting passwords and login information
• Installing and configuring software
• Automating network management processes (e.g. protocol execution, server monitoring)
• Automating cloud migration processes
• Performing regular diagnostics

Managing clients’ data warehouses

RPA bots can automate rule-based data warehousing processes to improve data quality, enhance data security, and decrease data warehouse deployment time. Some of the data warehousing processes that can be automated by RPA bots include:

• Data backups and updates
• ETL (extract, transforms, load) processes
• Data warehouse inventory and reporting
• Monitoring data warehouse workflows
• Detecting breaches and cyber attacks
• Aggregating data from multiple sources
• Cross checking data against different sources to avoid duplicates and errors

Automating customer service requests

RPA bots can automate numerous customer service processes, such as:

• Automating email and messaging communications
• Generating customer invoices
• Processing payments
• Updating client information and requests

MSPs can find numerous automatable tasks within their organization such as finance and accounting tasks, SAP processes, and HR tasks.

What are the challenges that face RPA adoption in MSPs?

The main challenge that faces MSPs when adopting RPA is the cost. If they want to offer RPA-as-a-Service to their clients, they need a cost model that doesn’t scale with number of bots since paying per bot can be costly:

• On average, a single bot can cost an organization $5,000-$15,000 annually.
• The time and cost to implement an RPA solution tend to be underestimated by organizations. A Deloitte survey has shown that 63% of organizations said their expectations of time to implement were not met and 37% said their expectations of cost to implement were not met.

Ideally, MSPs aim to pay flat fees for bot platforms which allow them to deploy a large number of bots to their clients, helping them achieve automation without excessive fees in a pay-as-you-go manner. There are some solution providers emerging that start to offer RPA platforms where fees do not increase linearly with the number of bots. We will update this article to cover them as these platforms mature.

What does a managed service provider do?

Managed service providers (MSPs) enable businesses to outsource business processes to external teams, which are mostly IT processes. Businesses rely on MSPs because MSPs provide:

• Technical talents (e.g. programmers, engineers, designers)
• Technical infrastructure (e.g. servers, data centers, clouds)
• Regular technical support and system updates
• Cybersecurity support (e.g. system patches, network monitoring)

MSPs provide these services at lower costs in comparison to in-house technical teams.

For more on RPA

To read about RPA use cases in different industries, feel free to read:

• RPA in Insurance Industry: Use Cases & Case Studies
• 10 RPA Applications/ Use Cases in Real Estate Industry
• Top 8 Use Cases & Benefits of RPA in Manufacturing
• RPA for Web Scraping: In-Depth Guide

If you still have unanswered questions about RPA, download our in-depth whitepaper on the topic:

And if you believe that you will benefit from an off-the-shelf RPA solution, feel free to scroll down our data-driven list of RPA vendors, and explore our automation solutions’ hub for automation tools and software.

And we can guide you find the right solution for your business:

This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Alamira Jouman Hajjar.