10 RPA / Automation predictions for 2021

2020 was a very strange year (Covid19, US election and more), but one thing which really took hold in 2020 was the adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software.

Nearly every organization has an RPA program in place, or in the process of piloting or planning for one. By expanding capabilities to related technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, IoT and others further enhances the ability to automate end-to-end processes.

Based on trends we are seeing now, here are my predictions for automation in 2021:

1. Intelligent Automation, relying primarily on Artificial Intelligence and other technologies, will automate more complex end-to-end flows

As automation teams in the various organization teams mature, more and more complex processes can be automated. Automation flows where RPA robots execute processes and supported by other technologies such as:

• Low-Code platforms enabling savvy business users to configure/create simple enterprise applications such as Oracle APEX, UiPath Apps, Appian to handle steps in the process.
• IOT to trigger business events based on events in real world
• AI/ML to be able to such unstructured data like understand human language/text, audio, video and images
• Data Integration Platforms such as Dell Boomi, Oracle Integration Cloud, Mulesoft and others to quickly integrate/trigger
• Intelligent Document Processing leveraging AI/ML
• Chatbots to either trigger human-in-loop process steps or trigger RPA flows from within chat session.

As organizations mature in their experience & understanding in these technologies coupled with RPA, the opportunities to automate more complex manual processes will be exponential as each technology is added to the toolbox.

2. RPA operations will start to scale in many organizations

As organizations move from piloting and simple processes to running a full fledged Automation COE (Center of Excellence) where automation becomes the mantra and always considered before changing processes. The Automation COE will play a more visible role in many organizations as it relates to process and IT changes.

Some of the large organizations already have 1000+ robots working 24/7 as virtual workers performing the tasks equivalent to thousands of employees. When "robot farms" are running at this scale it becomes critical to manage this virtual workforce correctly.

This includes having both Automation COE with proper Segregation of Duties (SOD) managing manage the intake, prioritization, delivery and re-usable components, as well as a Robotic Operation Center (ROC) managing monitoring & reporting, infrastructure and support.

Automation becomes part of the culture within organizations where every activity in every process is constantly assessed for automation.

How often have you seen or heard people complain they don't have time to focus on the improvements as they are too busy (with transactions)? By moving the boring repetitive work will shift to robots, allowing humans to focus more on important and interesting work to improve & strengthen processes & policies.

3. Process/Task Mining adoption continue to increase

Business Intelligence can tell management that something went wrong whereas Process Mining can provide insights in to why or how something went wrong. This information also provides automation opportunity detection. Many organizations have either piloted and started process/task mining projects and in 2021 more companies will start, while those who have piloted will expand the number of processes mined.

The benefits of these technologies can be significant, not only from the ability to identify cost savings and inefficiencies, but also the ability to improve customer or supplier experiences. Process mining is not only there to identify RPA automation opportunities but also identify changes to process, policies, applications, data management and more.

Celonis, a young startup but still the juggernaut in process mining software was at the end of 2019 valued at more than $2.5B with an overall market growth of more than 100% per year, 2021 will be the year when many more process mining projects are prioritized as part of IT budgets.

4. Democratization of RPA technologies

Empowering employees by providing the skills and tools to automate simple processes enables organizations to automate bottoms-up, while management and Process Improvement teams will look to automate from top-down. Automation COE will support the development of more complex processes but many of the simpler processes can really be done by the business users themselves.

More and more companies are training existing employees across all departments, business and IT alike. Making RPA trainings accessible for all the employees and giving them access to RPA software.

UiPath has a vision of ‘a robot for every person’, which in essence means that employees armed with these digital co-workers are able to continuously improve productivity and output, while boring repetitive work gets automated.

5. Expanded RPA vendor capabilities

As the top RPA vendors continue to enhance their products they are more becoming a full fledged Integrated intelligent automation platform. Here are the current key UiPath products and as you can see this is much more than just a robot and an orchestrator to help automate processes from end to end.

UiPath now has both Process Mining (leveraging application logs to map out how process actually gets executed) as well as Task Mining (leveraging desktop activities to capture what happens outside corporate applications) to enable better understanding and identification of opportunities and challenges with existing business processes while also able to measure the effects of RPA.

Applications such as Document Understanding & AI Fabric bring in ML-based document processing capabilities, whereas Action Center & Chatbots brings in the ability to handle human-in-loop processing with tasks and communications. Recently the Apps module was released which is a low-code platform which allows you to quickly configure/build enterprise applications which are integrated with robots.

2021 will include not only enhancements to existing products, but also start to tap in to new verticals enabling enterprise-wide hyper-automation.

6. Robot-as-a-Service models will take hold

Cost, particularly for SME's as well as in low cost markets outside US/Europe/Japan/ANZ, has been a hindering factor in adoption and piloting of automation. By offering robots as a service and avoiding having to buy and manage licenses automation pilots and adoption can get started with minimal up-front investment.

We have started pilots with several customers leveraging a RaaS model instead of traditional licensing models.

As per Gartner's 2021 Data & Analytics predictions through 2024:

"By 2023, more than 50% of large enterprises will adopt more robotic process automation platform as a service (rpaPaaS) than on-premises RPA."

7. Automation market will start to consolidate amid pricing pressure

The top 3 RPA vendors (UiPath, Automation Anywhere & Blue Prism) dominates market share and is expected to continue in 2021 as their capabilities continue to expand. We are also working with several customers who went with lower tier RPA tools to consolidate all their RPA automation leveraging the UiPath eco system.

5 years ago there may have been little difference in capabilities between many of the vendors and there are 100+ smaller RPA vendors including open source options to choose from but as the top vendors are able to invest in expanded capabilities the difference between the top players and the others continue to grow.

For smaller SME's the lower cost options may make good sense but for larger organizations looking to scale it makes more sense to go with the vendors who are continuing to invest in expanded capabilities.

This will result in consolidation and removal of several of the smaller vendors and also significant pricing pressures at the lower end of the spectrum. Those then who implemented automation using the small vendors will, if they want to have support, need to switch.

8. RPA will be adopted by more & more SME's

Automation is not only reserved for the large players and we are seeing SME's adopt RPA on a large scale given the relatively low cost to implement. Many SME's have significant resource constraints putting pressure on current employees and by automating processes they will realize cost and efficiency benefits.

Many SME's leverage either out-of-box packaged software (customizations too costly) or Excel-based manual processes to process transactions. As organizations start to realize the benefits and relatively low cost of automation, it may make more sense to automate a process on sub-optimal software using RPA, than to implement costly new enterprise software. If most of the transactions are performed by robots the user experience and error prevention/hardening becomes less important as robots will not make the same mistakes or forget to do as humans do.

We predict that 2021 we will see a significant increase in adoption for organizations in SME market particularly those who deal in consumer facing roles in ecommerce, logistics or others with high volume of transactions.

9. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) will be grow significantly in 2021

IDP is one of RPA's top partners and processes which are just using RPA to access applications, calling API's, Excel operations, sending emails etc. are the first processes to get implemented. Many business processes are still (unfortunately) reliant on documents and we expect many organizations starting to move their automation to these more complex processes.

Those which can be improved by moving to more reliable inputs such as online forms or to fillable pdf forms can avoid this more complex (and costlier option) but as organizations are expanding the scope of automation to include documents, the automation depends on Intelligent Automation to convert unstructured data from documents in to actionable structured data.

Document Processing in essence involves two key steps:

1. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the images in the document in to text & tables. Advanced OCR engines such as Google Cloud OCR, Abbyy Finereader and many others are now, supported by AI/ML, able to convert in to text at impressive accuracy.
2. Document Understanding leveraging AI/ML which in essence extracts this data in to the correct fields supported by self-learning and a human-in-loop process to evaluate exceptions. Some companies are able to achieve close to 90% Straight-Through-Processing (no manual review required) for invoices. This because many vendors including ABBYY, UiPath, Google and others are providing pre-trained ML models for common document types such as invoices, receipts, tax forms etc. reducing the need to train the models from scratch.

Expect to see many more companies embarking on document processing in 2021. Below is the Everest Group IDP comparison of the top IDP vendors for 2020.

10. Shortage of truly experienced automation designers, architects & developers

Adoption of RPA will continue to growing at high double digits in 2021 and there will continue to be a shortage of experienced and skilled automation resources. There are an abundance of developers with less than 0-2 years experience but finding resources with 3+ years experience will be harder than ever (can't get 3 years experience in 6 months 😁).

Symprio provides automation consulting, training and Robot-as-a-Service services, headquartered in San Jose, CA USA and with offices in Singapore, Malaysia and India.

As a UiPath Gold partner we focus on Robotics Process Automation, but in addition we also provide chatbot, AI/ML, Intelligent Document Processing as well as process consulting enabling end-to-end intelligent automation design.

Drop us a note at contact@symprio.com if you want to know more