The robotic process automation market continues to grow as a tactical solution to improve operational efficiency via noninvasive integration. It is an emerging priority for leaders in finance as it can minimize repetitive tasks like ones tied to payment procurement, order-to-cash, and reporting functions. With its ability to streamline financial function, finance professionals can reimagine their strategic focus as a department.
This State of RPA Survey Report conducted by the Research and Editorial team of Dynamic Communities is designed to examine the market, more specifically the industries, roles, benefits, and adoption barriers for such software.
The Dynamic Communities Research and Editorial team distributed a survey to Business Application Users worldwide in the spring of 2021. This State of RPA Report aims to help businesses understand the industries, roles, benefits, and adoption barriers that are affecting them today. Keeping an eye on RPA’s impact is critical as businesses strive to improve the quality and velocity of their decisions.
The global automotive robotics market size in 2020 was worth $2.29 billion and is expected to grow by a 40 percent CAGR between 2020 to 2024, reaching the $8.85 billion mark by 2024.
The growing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market promises to deliver business benefits such as decreased costs, reduced errors, greater efficiencies, and the ability to free up workers from mundane and repetitive tasks such as data entry so they can focus on more challenging, strategic initiatives.
RPA typically uses a combination of user interface (UI) interactions and APIs to integrate and perform data transcription work between different enterprise and productivity applications. At a minimum, RPA software tools must include the following core capabilities:
- Low-code capabilities to build automation scripts
- Integration with enterprise applications
- Orchestration and administration including configuration, monitoring, and security
Survey Findings
Top Represented Industries
Manufacturing 35% Technology 31% Healthcare 10%
- Showing industry growth spurred by the cloud and industry-specific solutions
- Hyper Automation is continuing to evolve as RPA, AI, and Machine Learning are becoming more democratized.
- Many companies are putting investments in tech as part of their long-term growth strategies.
Company Size
Mid-Market: $10M-$1B at 48.7%
Small / Medium Business: less than $10M at 34.42%
Large Enterprise: greater than $1B at 16.88%
- When compared to the Enterprise and Small/Medium Business categories, the Mid-Market category was the highest represented and reported seeing significant benefits from leveraging RPA.
- Mid-Market and SMB categories are outpacing Enterprise in planning their RPA adoption at 16.88% and 14.29% respectively.
- This exemplifies the “trickle-down” effect that has resulted from the Enterprise’s early adoption of RPA. As RPA solutions become more democratized and affordable, we predict the SMB space will begin to realize the benefits of RPA.
RPA Adoption Barriers
- Internal resistance to change represented as greeted organizational barrier
- IT Roles feel they lack training and knowledge to understand and execute the technology
- Other departments or roles lack resources to support the efforts of the IT department
- Organizations may be forming dependencies on third-party RPA solutions and/or providers.
- Without cooperative efforts between IT and a third-party provider, long-term maintenance of the RPA infrastructure and individual bots might be weak or come with security risks
Familiarity with RPA Vendors
- Many of the RPA vendors are competing for attention in the explosive RPA market. However, a vast majority of people are not familiar with any of the top RPA players.
- The RPA vendors still have a long way to go as many are not familiar with the solutions available. This speaks to the untapped market and the future growth predictions of around $25 billion by 2027. As this growth happens, new innovations will emerge that will further fuel the expansion of RPA adoption and differentiate the unique players in the competitive landscape.
RPA Benefits
- Many companies are looking to utilize RPA for its benefits. The greatest benefit represented the automation of manual tasks. The exemplified secondary benefit is the “reduction in human errors”.
- Further, the shifting of the CFO’s focus and responsibilities are surfaced as they see the true impact of technology within the business. With RPA’s ability to streamline financial processes, and with many seeing ROI in under 12 months, CFOs are realizing the benefits of RPA and are willing to make budgetary investments for the future.
This exclusive State of Robotic Process Automation Report addresses these best practices in more detail and advises how to stay aware of this growing market and associated benefits.
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