Robotic Process Automation - Opportunities in Data Migration

How do you migrate data out of an application when you do not know the data model or where the application data is stored in?

Due to mergers and acquisitions many large organizations are faced with this challenge. An acquired company may have applications that do the same functions as you have. It makes no sense to keep both the systems. But consolidation may be hampered or impossible due to lack of support from the product vendor or lack of expertise. It may also be the case that the technology platform is outdated. Some organizations choose to retain both the systems because they have to continue supporting the underlying business or customer segments. This leads to over the years to multitude of systems that are hard to consolidate, integrate and maintain. Even after deciding which of the systems to retain, data migration out of one system proves to be difficult. To take an example from author’s own experience, a large telecom service provider had over 10 billing systems based on mainframe and open architecture due to the merger of multiple Bell companies in the US.

Robotic Process Automation provides a simple yet cost effective solution to this problem. What if we could have a Robot “manually” retrieve every bit of information using the front end of the legacy application, add the missing information or remove the information that is not needed and then use the front end again, but now of the new target application to persist the data in the new format?

That is exactly what a software robot can do. Designing such a robot is not only easy, but very cost effective and quick. The cost saving could be huge when compared to maintaining multiple systems.

Robotic Process Automation tools like Blue Prism can solve this problem and address similar use cases to help organization in their system consolidation strategy.