Interestingly as per a Gartner report from FY20, the process agnostic software that powers hyper-automation (e.g. This is dwarfed by the enterprise application market pegged at around $215 billion (by several analysts such as Allied Market Research, IDC, etc). Per a Forrester report, the RPA market is set to be around $2.9 billion in 2021 up from $125 million in 2016. Needless to add they improved their revenue and profitability.įinally, let’s look at some numbers. Intelligent Automation is now a strategic lever to help organisations operate in a lights out mode – it is the intelligent digital worker – that can not only automate key processes end to end, but also help organisations to create new products and services e.g., the ability of the pharma companies to conduct large scale research and create vaccines and drugs to fight the pandemic in record time, efficiently scale the supply chain and helping humanity.
This can be solved using NLP for reading varied invoice input formats with structured and unstructured inputs, invoice classification and tax validation can be done by a machine learning algorithm and the approval and posting can be done by RPA. Now the next question is how does one automate processes end to end and enterprise-wide? These can be addressed through a combination of emerging technologies such as RPA, machine learning, natural language processing and generation, intelligent chatbots, intelligent workflow, etc.Īs an example, let us look at the process of invoice processing with varied invoice inputs (structured and unstructured inputs), invoice classification of goods vs services, and correct tax verification. But the disruption driven by the pandemic has forced the businesses to leverage emerging technology in a far more strategic manner to truly complement the human worker e.g., automate processes end to end in a lights out mode and not just in finance, HR, and IT but enterprise-wide.
Thus far, RPA was at best a tactical initiative barely visible to the CEO and the Board. Engineering, metals, mining, hospitality, healthcare, insurance, etc have some catching up to do. You may automate a large part of Procure to Pay (standard) using RPA and pieces of order to cash, but touchless end-to-end procure to pay or order to cash using RPA is mostly a pipe dream.Īnother point to note is that most of the processes being automated are primarily in Finance, HR, IT, and reporting and not really on the operations side like manufacturing, inventory management, supply chain, logistics, research & development.īesides industries have not yet consistently adopted RPA e.g., banking, financial services, and shared services are the furthest ahead with consumer products, retail, and manufacturing following close behind. In terms of end-to-end enterprise-wide processes, RPA can address about 25-35% of the enterprise-wide processes. However, this does represent the true picture, because this 60% of processes are not end-to-end enterprise-wide processes. Results have shown that RPA can manage nearly 60% of the processes across most organisations that are either manual, straight through, or error prone.