As the business landscape undergoes seismic change and companies race to meet consumer demands for ever-increasing availability and convenience, robotic process automation (RPA) presents an opportunity for businesses to save costs, realise efficiencies, and reduce error rates.
This is according to Ajit Paul, associate director at Deloitte, who notes robot software - used to capture and interpret existing IT applications - is fast becoming an essential ingredient in developing robust disaster recovery plans for back office processes.
Paul says for employees, RPA can be beneficial as they are able to spend less time on mundane tasks and more time on complex, value-based tasks.
The global robotic process automation market size was valued at $ 125.2 million in 2015, says Grand View Research. Growing demand for automating the business processes is boosting the demand for the RPA market, it notes.
Organisations rely on RPA in order to improve efficiency, reduce costs, human errors and enhance regulatory compliance, adds Grand View Research.
For companies looking to save costs, robots can be implemented at one-tenth of the cost of a full-time employee in an offshore location such as India, while team members are retrained for higher-level work, says Paul.
Robotics lead to huge cost savings, by taking out manual repetitive work, says John Watling, MD for Accenture Operations.
By introducing robotics and automation, the error percentage in processes will dramatically drop, adds Watling.
"Robots don't make errors, they simply follow the exact instructions that were provided to them by their human operators. These instructions are either modelled in a visual workflow or taught to the RPA tool by recording and analysing the process as being performed by a human operator."
Various studies expect more than 35% of jobs will be automated in the next 10 to 20 years, and that lower paid jobs that contain more repetitive tasks will be the earliest and most affected, says Watling.
This is because RPA technology has the capability to rapidly automate standard operating procedures and tasks of existing business processes without any changes or intrusion to the server side of the applications used by the operations team to complete business transactions, he adds.
Paul says RPA is a relatively new technology which is not yet widespread. "We anticipate that RPA will have a profound impact on the shared services sector within the next few years."
"In surveying Deloitte clients in the UK and Europe, we have found that automation is high on the strategic agenda for shared services organisations and business service leaders and is expected to remain so over the next 10 years.
"However, relatively few of these organisations have currently adopted RPA. In total, 22% of Deloitte clients surveyed in July this year have implemented or piloted robotics, 76% said they were planning to investigate the technology within the next year."
On the other hand Watling says SA is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to RPA, however, there is the most potential for growth in the African continent.
In Accenture's TechVision 2016 report, the major drivers for automation in SA will be cost reduction and improving operational efficiencies.
"The areas 'ripe' for automation in the region are IT services and customer experience task - with more than 80% of South African enterprises expecting to automate these tasks," says Watling.
He notes RPA will be a game changer for business process outsourcing in the coming years.
"This is because RPA technology has the capability to rapidly automate standard operating procedures and tasks of existing business processes without any changes or intrusion to the server side of the applications used by the operations team to complete business transactions."
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