Market Analysis
published on May 18, 2016
Report Overview:
NelsonHall’s “RPA – Raising the Bar for Continuous Improvement” 19-page report is based on interviews with executives within both BPS vendors applying RPA to processes and with RPA software product vendors.
The report analyzes the operational opportunities arising from RPA together with the commercial implications of applying RPA within BPS services.
In particular, the report analyzes the principal areas of application for RPA, the typical levels of benefit that organizations can expect from RPA, the role of RPA within BPS and how it fits into the wider process improvement framework, the requirements for successful implementation of RPA, and the commercial implications of RPA within BPS contracts.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s “RPA – Raising the Bar for Continuous Improvement” report is an analysis of the application and benefits of RPA designed for:
- Sourcing managers investigating the operational and commercial implications of RPA
- Vendor marketing, sales and business managers developing strategies to utilize RPA within business process services (BPS)
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the IT services and BPS sector
Scope of this Report:
The report is based on interviews with executives within both BPS vendors applying RPA to processes and with RPA software product vendors.
The report analyzes the operational opportunities arising from RPA together with the commercial implications of applying RPA within BPS services. In particular, the report covers:
- What are the principal areas of application for RPA?
- What level of benefits can organizations expect from RPA at both the sub-process and process levels?
- What is the role of RPA within BPS and how does it fit into the wider process improvement framework?
- What are the requirements for successful application of RPA?
- What are the commercial implications of RPA within BPS contracts and what are the pricing approaches that are most commonly being adopted?
- How are the BPS vendors approaching RPA?
Key Findings & Highlights:
RPA, or robotics process automation, is a source of considerable confusion largely caused by the combination of the “robotics” name and its usual accompaniment by pictures of humanoid robots. In reality, RPA has nothing to do with physical robots, it is essentially workflow software which also undertakes tasks, usually via the user interface. So it is software that replicates the operations of a human agent, operating against a strict set of rules.
So a fairly simple concept and piece of software. However, what makes RPA exciting is that there has traditionally been a wide range of process issues within existing BPS services that were often well-known and identified by either lean initiatives or analytics or even just common sense, but which were too complicated to address with macros but too insignificant to justify a massive, lengthy and expensive new platform implementation. RPA provides a quick and relatively low-cost mechanism for addressing many of these process issues.
Accordingly, it frees up a whole new bandwidth for continuous improvement as a series of implementations at the micro-process level, with very significant implications for process cost and quality.