One of the fastest growing segments of the software market today is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). According to experts, the development of this area will not slow down in the coming years and further growth is expected. Organizations increasingly appreciate RPA’s ability to automate routine human tasks involving data processing. Czech enterprises share this view.
In the early days, RPA was associated with what we would now consider to be primitive screen capture applications and workflow automation software. Over time, however, RPA has evolved into an enterprise-wide megatrend that puts automation at the heart of digital business strategies.
As the world accelerates, so does the evolution of technology and hardware used to accelerate business processes. According to Gartner, the RPA market registered a 31 percent revenue growth in 2021, reaching a total value of $2.4 billion in the industry. In comparison, the global software market registered 16 percent growth over the same period. Based on the available predictions, this year’s pace should be even faster.
RPA is quickly evolving, and its acronym no longer accurately defines the concept itself. Indeed, RPA has embarked on the next phase of its development. It is evolving into an enterprise-wide automation strategy. While previously it focused solely on back-office automation in areas such as finance, RPA has now become a catalyst for enterprise-wide transformation in many companies. It no longer focuses solely on finding cost savings in finance and other departments. It has moved beyond the scope of the CFO’s competence.
Today, automation helps to address labour shortages; it optimizes environmental and social areas; it contributes to corporate governance and supply chain management; and it helps with inflation challenges and improves capital allocation. To address today’s supply chain shortages, automation helps cope with the challenge and it helps with inventory management, prioritization, price matching, and other complex and time-consuming processes. In fact, the combination of RPA and machine learning helps managers reduce the time to evaluate and optimize decisions.
Incorporating RPA into enterprise software systems and into a broader intelligent automation system is clearly a long-term trend, as it is in the interest of business prosperity to build heterogeneous automation structures. According to Forrester, a leading research and advisory firm, this year alone, 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies will adopt an automation fabric that will lead to automation-based business transformation.
Our surveys clearly show that Czech enterprises are increasingly interested in RPA. The Czech Republic is also doing better than Slovakia. This is because businesses in the Czech Republic want to have more control over their costs and save resources. Companies in the financial sector are more proficient in this respect, followed by those in the telecommunications, retail, and e-commerce sectors. Entities in the distribution and industrial sectors are lagging behind. Even hospitals are not doing that well with automation. We are trying to help them as much as we can; however, we often find that they do not even respond to our offer to implement the chosen solutions for free. Unfortunately, this is a very rigid sector and it is very difficult to penetrate. RPA certainly would help hospitals with administration, invoices, human resources, and even things like purchasing for the hospital canteen – where employees manually search for discounted products on the web and check prices with suppliers.
On the positive side, the use of RPA in the public sector is growing quite well year on year; however, it could certainly grow much faster. The public sector has seen the light in times of COVID-19, and it is now trying to make up for the missed years as much as it can.
As for the private sector, it is much harder to get into large corporations– where they have already been using some automation processes – than into SMEs. To give you an idea, thanks to deploying RPA in the Nay Group (which includes the Electroworld chain), they no longer have to recruit twenty staff each year in the peak season and then lay them off again at the end of the year. Now up to 92 percent of their processes are automated. Experience has also shown that automation is a very useful tool for shared service centres and business centres.
Generally speaking, women working with RPA perform better than men. It is not so much about programming, but rather about figuring out all the processes and what could possibly happen in each scenario. Another thing is that companies often believe they are going digital, but the reality is often different. In most cases, their idea of digitalizing their business is to use emails and scan purchase orders into a system. They have similar misconceptions of futuristic concepts such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Here it is worth mentioning that the decision to implement or use RPA should not be made solely by the CEO or CIO. In fact, most of the requests come from the bottom up, i.e. from staff that we are in contact with during the planning and implementation process. We collect their requirements and suggestions. Chatbots are a great solution for customer-oriented companies, but companies tend to cut them down to the bare minimum and it shows. That is why you rarely see a well-functioning good chatbot. The challenge for RPA in the future will be to create complicated things, i.e. to automate what usually or seemingly cannot be automated. And we welcome that.
A clear trend in RPA is outsourcing – a company has a robot deployed by an implementer and runs it in the cloud. This ensures data security as well as the operation in the client environment. This trend is going to grow in the near future. Another thing we are seeing when it comes to process automation is the merging of different technologies into one intelligent hyperautomation. This is happening through automated process mapping and combined robot + human solutions. Unlike before, when people were concerned about losing their jobs due to automation, with major staff shortages on the job market and companies having difficulties finding any employees at all (with a few exceptions, companies do not lay off their staff), we are happy that robots can now do the work of multiple employees.
In the next few years, RPA will be very useful for tracking competitors, especially competitor websites, which will allow companies to change the prices of their products and services depending on the current prices of their competitors. This is a new feature.
The world is looking to the future with concern, be it the constant disruption of supply chains, inflation, or the looming recession. These factors will be decisive when it comes to investing in technology. If an organization of any type lacks the funds to invest in sophisticated automation tools, RPA allows them to quickly convert manual and routine processes to fully automated ones and thus optimize their operations for a relatively low cost. In this way, they will continue to benefit from the new normal.
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