Spoiler alert: This isn't a granular piece on Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Nope, for that check out the Gartner Report: Robotic Process Automation: Eight Guidelines for Effective Results. Or, dive into the white paper: RPA and Enterprise Automation, Strategies and Technologies to Win in the Digital Economy.
But here's the thing. With constant advances in RPA and the digital workforce digital disruption will happen sooner and faster than you ever imagined.
For starters, there's a disruptive trend going on in the way work gets done.
In the past, CXOs offshored high-volume back office production and IT operations to take advantage of cheap foreign labor. Today not so much.
Labor costs have trended up, while software-powered digital labor is now cheaper, faster and more productive than old school labor arbitrage ever was.
RPA fundamentally represents a pivot to digital labor the reinvention of how work gets done.
The most successful companies are pivoting from people to software for high-volume, highly transactional manual processes, to take advantage of this emerging digital workforce.
So why is this pivot so important? Because traditional approaches to labor arbitrage, and doing more with less, are becoming less and less relevant each day.
Trend watchers say that by the end of 2017, it will be totally clear that the next generation of market leaders will be the companies quickest to harness RPA to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
Meanwhile, the RPA skeptics, the wait-and-see'ers? They will struggle to remain relevant.
RPA will grow 70 to 90 percent by 2018
It's worth noting that the average size of the top global outsourcing contracts has shrunk from $680 million in 2005 to $392 million in 2015, according toIDC. In contrast, the RPA market grew 64 percent to $200 million last year and is expected to grow 70 to 90 percent by 2018 according to an Everest Group study.
The punchline? Traditional approaches to doing high-volume, highly transactional work are becoming increasingly obsolete.
Back in the day, businesses were people-based, supported by software. But in the age of digital transformation, we're seeing a shift to software-based business models supported on the perimeter by people.
With the rise of RPA, this shift will dramatically and permanently change business and pricing models. It will provide a great advantage for CIOs that embrace it and it will be dangerously disruptive for businesses that are slow to make the pivot to digital labor.
If you're ready to pivot to digital labor, sign up for a demo of Appian RPA with Blue Prism today.
The digital labor trend is real. But just because RPA is more productive, just because it's more efficient, just because it's better at automating repetitive and rule based tasks doesn't mean you have to embrace it.
You could sit back and play fast follower instead.
But why take the risk when customer expectations are rising faster than ever, when your competitors are arming themselves with RPA, when your board is wondering why you haven't moved the needle on sales and revenue, while your competitors have.
If you're still skeptical, if you're still keeping RPA at arm's length like it's too risky consider the math. By 2020, 40% of very large global organizations will have adopted an RPA software tool, up from an estimated less than 10% today, according to Gartner.
What it comes down to is this.
Much better to embrace RPA now than end up in the trophy case of a digital competitor instead.
Tick tock goes the RPA clock...
In this timely episode of the Appian Industry Outlook podcast, Prittam Bagani, Appian Director of Product Strategy, and Zach Messler explore:
- How and why RPA delivers immediate business value.
- Practical RPA use cases.
- Benefits of combining RPA with BPM and other complementary technologies.>
- Importance of fitting RPA into your enterprise automation roadmap.
- How Appian with Blue Prism takes the complexity out of RPA integrations.
Take a listen below to learn more.
[podcast id="12623507" text="Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Capabilities and Considerations for Enterprise Automation" on Spreaker."]
