UK businesses fail to scale on their RPA investment

The Robotic Process Automation market is expected to reach $2.3bn this year and $4.3bn by 2022. However, companies which are implementing RPA are falling short on the returns, as 30 to 50 per cent of initial RPA projects fail.

Increasing productivity, reducing costs and boosting profit margins are powerful motives driving investment; yet the majority of enterprises are struggling to adopt RPA at scale. According to HFS Research, only 13 per cent of enterprise RPA initiatives achieve scale across the entire organisation. With another year of accelerated growth, analysts forecast that 2019 is going to be a year of maturation, where businesses will move beyond RPA pilot programmes.

The top priority for business leaders across industries is to scale their RPA initiatives to achieve wider corporate objectives. However, poorly planned RPA implementation and internal resistance are proving barriers to innovation, resulting in non-optimised processes being automated with no business value, according to Dr. Gero Decker, CEO of Signavio.

Dr. Decker comments: “The reason a lot of companies are only seeing marginal returns on their RPA deployment is because they are diving straight into automation before understanding and optimising their existing processes. Whilst it’s tempting to focus on short-term fixes, this approach to optimising process efforts is not sustainable. Automating bad processes just means you can make the same mistakes faster.

“Improve the process before you automate it, by leveraging crowdsourced ideas. Capturing existing knowledge and insights from staff before RPA is implemented is an important component of an enterprise-wide initiative. Empowering business users to take ownership means there is constant end-to-end monitoring and re-engineering of processes, so enterprises not only improve performance, but also remain committed to business outcomes.”

Dr. Decker continues: “Enterprise-level RPA allows businesses to respond to change and disruption, monitoring end-to-end performance so employees can anticipate and detect potential problems and risks in advance. It is important to recognise that deploying RPA is not a one-time set-up. Therefore, all employees need to take ownership to govern process architecture and identify opportunities for continuous improvements.”