Migrating Your RPA: Best Practices and Common Pitfalls to Avoid

“You know what keeps me up at night?” Sundar asked, swirling the remains of his masala chai. “We’ve invested three years and countless crores in our RPA system, and now I need to tell the board we have to migrate everything.”

As a leader at ValueDX, I’ve had this exact conversation with dozens of technology leaders across India. Sundar, RPA leader of a major BFSI player in Mumbai, had built one of the most extensive RPA implementations I’d ever seen—over 350 bots handling everything from customer onboarding to regulatory reporting.

But their system was showing its age. Maintenance costs were spiraling, and their vendor had announced end-of-support for their old platform version. On another hand, they were doubling the renewal cost of new version licenses! Sundar needed a path forward that wouldn’t disrupt the critical automation that kept his business running.

What unfolded over the next seven months taught me valuable lessons about RPA migration that I’m eager to share. Spoiler alert: Sundar’s team not only successfully migrated, but they also reduced operating costs by ₹2.4 crore annually and decreased processing times by 43%.

During a recent industry meetup in Bengaluru, I asked a room of 30 technology leaders how many were contemplating RPA migration. Twenty-three hands went up.

The reasons were surprisingly consistent:

The technology leap has been massive: Kiran, who manages automation for a healthcare provider in Hyderabad, showed me her original RPA implementation from 2018. “It’s like comparing a feature phone to the latest iPhone,” she laughed. The gap in capabilities—particularly around AI integration and intelligent document processing—had become too significant to ignore.
Growth exposes scalability limits: “Our business grew 300% in three years, but our RPA infrastructure can’t keep up,” explained Nisha, Digital Transformation Head at a leading e-commerce company. Her team was manually intervening in nearly 40% of transactions because their legacy system couldn’t handle the volume.
The mathematics of maintenance: For Sundar, the tipping point was purely financial. “We calculated that we’re spending ₹85 lakhs annually just maintaining our current system—patching, fixing broken bots, and paying premium support fees for outdated technology.”
Compliance nightmares: One banking client discovered their legacy RPA platform couldn’t implement the encryption standards required by the latest RBI guidelines. The compliance deadline gave them just four months to find a solution.

Vendor relationship breakdowns: “They quoted us ₹32 lakhs to add a simple reporting module,” a frustrated operations director from a manufacturing firm in Chennai told me. “That’s when I knew we needed to explore alternatives.”

After guiding numerous organizations through successful migrations, I’ve developed a practical playbook that works in the real world—not just in theory.

“But we already have an inventory of our bots,” Sundar insisted when I suggested we start with a comprehensive assessment.

Two weeks later, he called me in a panic. “We just discovered an entire suite of credit risk assessment bots that nobody documented. They were built by a contractor who left two years ago.”

This scenario repeats itself in almost every migration project. The reality is that most organizations have “shadow RPA”—automation built outside official channels that nonetheless performs critical functions.

What works:

Go beyond documentation: Use discovery tools that can scan your systems for automation artifacts. When we ran these for Kiran’s healthcare organization, we found 28% more bots than were in their official inventory.
Follow the data trail: Map where your automation processes pull data from and push data to. This often reveals hidden dependencies.
Talk to the business users: Some of our most important discoveries come from casual conversations with operations teams. “Oh, that old thing? Yeah, we run that every Tuesday to prepare the board reports,” they’ll mention about a critical but undocumented process.
Classify and prioritize: Not all bots are created equal. We helped Sundar’s team categorize their automation portfolio by business impact, complexity, and stability. This became our migration roadmap.

Early in our planning discussions, I asked Nisha what success would look like for her e-commerce company’s migration.

“I want to be able to sleep through the night without getting emergency calls about failed bots,” she said immediately.

But as we dug deeper, more strategic objectives emerged:

Reducing exception rates from 40% to under 10%
Cutting bot development time from weeks to days
Enabling business users to modify simple automation rules without IT involvement
Implementing multilingual support for customer communications

These specific goals transformed their migration from a technical necessity into a business opportunity.

For your migration strategy, consider:

Quantifiable improvements: Define precise metrics for success—reduced costs, faster processing times, lower error rates.
Choose the right approach for each process: When we analyzed Sundar’s 350+ bots, we determined that 60% could be migrated with minimal changes (lift-and-shift), 25% needed significant redesign to leverage new capabilities, and 15% should be retired and rebuilt from scratch.

Plan for business continuity: Kiran’s team developed a brilliant approach—they created a “migration window” for each process based on business cycles, ensuring critical operations weren’t disrupted during peak periods.

I’ve seen too many organizations make platform decisions based on flashy demos or magic quadrants. The reality is more nuanced, especially for Indian companies with unique requirements.

During Sundar’s platform evaluation, I recommended bringing in actual developers who would use the system daily, not just architects and managers. Their insights proved invaluable.

Key considerations that matter in real-world implementations:

Integration capabilities with Indian business systems: Many global RPA platforms struggle with locally developed ERPs and banking systems. We conducted proof-of-concept tests with Sundar’s core banking system before making a decision.
Language and document processing: Can the platform handle regional languages and document formats common in Indian business? For Kiran’s healthcare company, this was critical for processing patient records from various states.
Total cost beyond licensing: Implementation, maintenance, training, and development costs often exceed the sticker price. We created a five-year TCO model for each platform Nisha’s team evaluated.
Local talent availability: The best platform on paper becomes a liability if you can’t find developers who know how to use it. We helped map the skill availability in key Indian tech hubs for different automation technologies.
Training and transition support: Vendor willingness to support migration from competitor platforms varies dramatically. We negotiated transition assistance for Sundar’s team as part of their contract.

After selecting their new platform, Sundar’s team was eager to start immediately. I gently applied the brakes.

“Let’s step back and create a migration approach that won’t give you heart attacks,” I suggested.

We developed a detailed roadmap with these elements:

Phased implementation with clear success criteria for each phase: We started with non-critical, standalone processes to build team confidence and iron out technical issues.
Dual-running critical systems: For core financial processes, we ran both old and new systems in parallel for a full monthly cycle, comparing outputs daily.
Risk-based testing strategy: For high-risk processes like regulatory reporting, we implemented exhaustive testing. For lower-risk processes, we used streamlined testing to accelerate delivery.
Contingency planning: Every critical process had a documented rollback procedure and manual workaround if needed.
Resource allocation across waves: We carefully planned which team members would work on which migration phases to prevent bottlenecks and burnout.

The result? Sundar’s migration proceeded without a single critical incident affecting their business operations.

“We don’t have time for extensive testing,” Nisha initially pushed back when I presented our testing plan. “We need to move quickly.”

Six weeks later, during a pilot migration, her team discovered that their product recommendation bots were generating completely different outputs in the new system due to subtle differences in how the platforms handled machine learning models.

“Thank goodness we caught this in testing,” she acknowledged. “If this had gone live, it would have cost us crores in lost sales.”

Testing approaches that have saved our clients from disaster:

Parallel running with comparison testing: We helped Sundar’s team develop automated comparators that flagged discrepancies between old and new systems in real-time.
Business process validation: Beyond technical testing, we involved business stakeholders to confirm that outputs made practical sense, not just technical sense.
Performance testing under real-world conditions: When we load-tested Kiran’s healthcare bots, we discovered the new platform actually slowed down significantly during month-end processing peaks—an issue we resolved before go-live.

Chaos engineering for RPA: We deliberately introduced failures to see how the new system would recover. Sundar’s team was initially uncomfortable with this approach but became believers after we identified several resilience issues.

After successfully migrating all 350+ bots, Sundar made a rookie mistake. “We’re done!” he announced triumphantly to his board.

I had to remind him: “The migration was just the beginning. Now the real work of optimization starts.”

We implemented a continuous improvement approach:

Performance monitoring dashboards: Real-time visibility into bot performance, exception rates, and processing times.
User feedback mechanisms: Simple channels for business users to report issues and suggest improvements.
Regular optimization cycles: Quarterly reviews to identify bots that could benefit from redesign to leverage new platform capabilities.
Skills development program: Ongoing training to ensure the team could fully utilize advanced features of the new platform.

Six months after migration, Sundar’s team had further reduced processing times by an additional 20% through these optimization efforts.

Despite best efforts, certain challenges appear in almost every migration. Here’s how we’ve helped clients overcome them:

1. The Planning Gap: Unrealistic Expectations

“This should take about three months, right?” asked one confident IT leader about a migration involving 200+ bots.

Reality check: Complex RPA migrations typically take 6-12 months for large enterprises. Setting unrealistic timelines creates unnecessary pressure and increases risk.

Solution: We developed a “migration complexity calculator” that helps estimate realistic timeframes based on bot count, complexity, dependencies, and team experience.

2. The Stakeholder Blindspot: Forgetting the Humans

A manufacturing client in Pune had technically perfect migration plans but faced massive resistance from business teams who hadn’t been involved in the process.

Solution: For Kiran’s healthcare migration, we created a stakeholder engagement model where:

Business representatives joined the migration team
Regular demos showcased improvements in the new system
Success stories were shared widely to build momentum
Training was tailored to different user groups
3. The Data Disconnect: Integration Challenges

“The new bots keep getting the wrong customer information,” reported Nisha’s team during early testing. The problem? Different data mapping conventions between platforms.

Solution: Develop comprehensive data mapping documentation and validation processes. For Sundar’s financial services migration, we created a data transformation layer that standardized formats between systems.

4. The Change Management Oversight: Resistance to New Ways of Working

“My team is still using workarounds from the old system,” Kiran discovered three months after migration. Users had developed habits around the limitations of their previous platform.

Solution: We implemented a “digital adoption” program including:

Champions in each department who received advanced training
Quick reference guides for common tasks
Regular check-ins to identify and address adaptation issues
Gamification elements to encourage use of new features
5. The Security Afterthought: New Vulnerabilities

During one client’s migration, we discovered their new RPA platform had significantly different security models, creating potential compliance issues.

Solution: Include security teams early in the planning process. For regulated industries, we now conduct pre-migration security assessments and post-migration security validation.

At ValueDX, we’ve refined our RPA migration methodology through dozens of successful projects. Our approach focuses not just on moving bots but on transforming automation capabilities.

For Sundar’s financial services company, the results speak for themselves:

100% successful migration of 350+ bots across 12 business units
Zero critical business disruptions during the seven-month project
₹2.4 crore annual savings in licensing and maintenance costs
43% reduction in average processing times
68% decrease in exception rates requiring manual intervention

For Nisha’s e-commerce business:

Automation exception rates dropped from 40% to 7%
New bot development time reduced from 3 weeks to 4 days on average
Customer language support expanded from 3 to 11 Indian languages
Peak season order processing capacity increased by 400%

And for Kiran’s healthcare organization:

Patient document processing accuracy improved from 82% to 96%
Compliance reporting time reduced from 3 days to 4 hours
Staff redeployed from manual exception handling to patient-facing roles

Are you facing RPA migration challenges? Our team at ValueDX understands the unique requirements of Indian businesses and has developed proven methodologies to ensure your success. From initial assessment through optimization, we partner with you at every step.

Contact us today to discuss how we can help transform your automation journey from migration anxiety to business advantage.