Regarding License Utilization

Hi everyone, I’m not sure about the category I chose (wasn’t there once a business section in the forum?), but this is about license utilization, so I guess Orchestrator isn’t that far off…

I am working on a license plan for a robot program and I want to find out what the typical utilization of a robot license is in an enterprise setting as there is little available information regarding this topic.

Do you have experience on this topic or do you know anyone who I could talk to?

Questions include:

  • Do you try to utilize a license 24/7 or just match one process with one license for convenience?
  • How do you deal with peak hours of workload/license utilization?
  • What are things I should keep in mind when developing a licensing plan?

Thank you in advance!

Hi @lukasziebold !
Not able to answer to all of the questions, but for the first one I can tell you that it depends on the client we work with.

There are two types of clients for unattended robots in VM environment:

  • those who want to divide the access to their VM by department. Depending on the maturity of the department (if they have a lot of jobs or not), the robot does not run 24h but only when needed manually, sometimes scheduled, but never during several days. For some of the deparments, one robot = one process, for others that are more mature one robot = several process (jobs).
  • those who share the access to their VM whatever the department may be. They have internally a calendar to know when A process from B department is supposed to start (scheduled), and if they want to delay it they can exchange with a department place depending on the duration of A process.
    It can be one to two days in a row, but otherwise in their calendar they have to take into account the IT department and the updates that have to occure at night (Windows updates). Because when there is a windows update the VM is unavailable so the job is not triggered. So they use queues to let the robot manage and run when there are no WU.

There is also the case of attended robots, usually in a selected number of computers, without orchestrator. That means that when the package of a process is updated, they all have manually to update it in their computer. As it runs in computers, the process are triggered manually and run only during office hours

Hope it helps :smile:

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Thank you for your reply Hiba!

The relation between program maturity and robot utilization is a good hint. For my purposes I am more interested in matured programs, that try to optimize the utilization. Windows Updates and other downtimes are also factors that I didn’t give too much thought before, thanks again!

Still though I want to find out more what the typical utilization of unattended licenses could look like. What might be thresholds for a satisfying utilization? Is 50% good? What is a plausible upper limit?

I’m tagging some Managers I saw in the 2021 MVP’s post (Congratulations!). I hope that is fine, maybe you can help me and share some insight?

@bdaly @Mr_Meeseeks @tracydixon @DiegoTurati

I found statistics from a Forrester Consulting study (May 2019, n=300) regarding RPA Utilization in my research that say 10% of respondents reported a utilization of more than 33% (8 hours a day).

62% reported utilization of less than 3 hours a day. The rest is somewhere in between.

Does anybody have any experience if a utilization of 33% is still considered good? Do you think the bar has changed since 2019?
Thanks

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How did you calculate robot utilization? If you may explain.

Hi,

a robot license or runtime is available 24/7, so you calculate average hours used (utilized) per day / 24.

8 / 24 ~ 0,33