When covid started, the country I live in set some temporary rules to relive some financial stress from the people. A lot of companies in our sector had to quickly abide by those rules (maybe 3 month time to prepare the new processes etc.)

Our company already had a lot of customers who would need a solution to maybe automate that.

And our project manager (and a potential customer with him) decided to not only use a native solution we could program directly into the system, but throw rpa on top.

This not only made the solution harder to program, it also made it slower (it could only run at night instead of each case instantly), more error prone, more programmers were needed (I could program a simple solution alone, with rpa we needed 3 people plus an extra tester) and also the solution was more expensive, because of paid licenses for the rpa software.

Suffice to say, we did not sell a single copy not even to the customer who wanted it. But we “shipped” it in a sense.