All the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Stats You Need to Know

If you’ve been keeping up with the tech industry over the last few years, you’ve probably heard much buzz surrounding the word robotic process automation (RPA) and its potential to change the way we work. The professional sphere is benefiting greatly from the explosion of intelligent automation start-ups and their applications that have appeared for the purpose of streamlining workflows, automating tasks and allowing human workers to focus on high-value work. WorkFusion has a suite of intelligent automation products to help you increase the scale of your operations and reduce overhead costs.

There’s no one-size-fit-all statistic that can accurately assess how much money RPA can save your company, how many of your work processes it can automate and how large-scale your operation can be without hiring hundreds of workers. The main reason for this is the fact that different companies have different technologies, systems, processes and they work in different industries. However, there are a number of RPA figures that can give you an idea of how much automation the technology can provide, as well as how much it can boost your ROI.

Here are some key stats surrounding the technology:

1) What It Can Help You Automate

RPA is becoming more prevalent among businesses of all sizes, helping them automate laborious endeavors such as accounting and IT tasks to help keep your operation running smoothly. The technology is very powerful in helping to reduce human errors that are bound to show up here and there in any manual operation. RPA automates rules-based processes in both the back- and front-office thanks to recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data, speech recognition technologies and deep neural networks.

The technology can help to reduce costs, increase accuracy, improve service delivery, help to maintain compliance and regulatory issues, while also improving the customer experience. About 70% to 80% of these rules-based processes can be automated, allowing companies to operate onshore at a lower cost than offshore. Companies that use RPA don’t need to rely on an offshore or outsource partner, ensuring 100% accuracy.

2) Reducing Human Hours

Approximately 10% to 20% of human work hours are spent on dull, repetitive computer tasks, according to Software Testing and Big Data Hadoop, marking quite a large chunk of time that is wasted on processes that can be easily automated. Researchers at the company estimate that IT departments also spend 30% of their time on low-level basic tasks. Plus, about 50% of companies spend $5 to $25 per manually-processed invoice.

Businesses are missing about 50% of all automation opportunities on average, while 13% of workers find these repetitive tasks to be a waste of time. Additionally, 98% of IT business leaders say that automating processes is essential to driving business benefits. The main tasks that can be automated are, in this order:

• Documenting and records management.
• Claims, bookings and invoice management.
• Customer relationship management.
• Human resources processes.
• IT processes.

WorkFusion has an RPA platform that can help companies automate these tasks and more in RPA Express.

3) The Future of RPA

Researchers at Hadoop estimate that the potential savings that companies will experience with RPA by 2025 is between $5 trillion to $7 trillion. The company also predicts that RPA softwares will be able to perform tasks equal to the output of 140 million FTEs by the same year. Statista believes that the RPA industry will be worth $3.1 billion by 2019 and $4.9 billion by 2020. According to Forrester, this figure is more likely to be around $2.9 billion by 2021.

AB Newswire adds that the RPA market is currently being dominated by the North America region, with Asia-Pacific adopting the technology at a high rate as well in the healthcare, retail, IT, BFSI and telecommunications industries. China and India have started to roll out outsourcing services that are boosting the market in those regions. In Europe, RPA is expected to grow in the manufacturing and logistics sectors, especially in Germany, Russia, Spain and Denmark.

The bottom line…

There is no telling how far RPA will go in automation tasks that could previously only be performed manually, but the technology has a lot of potential in transforming the way businesses operate. Virtually every industry in every part of the world will benefit from the capabilities of an intelligent automation system in the coming years. As long as businesses are on the hunt for new solutions, lower overhead and a higher ROI, RPA will continue becoming more sophisticated and prevalent.