How COVID-19 will change the RPA Landscape.

Navigating through tough times like this using new-age disruption is one great boon offered by Industry 4.0 technologies. When most of the industries have slowed down due to the economic recession induced by a coronavirus, unsung heroes like Robotics Process Automation (RPA) are moving forward to offer recession-proof operations. Its successful implementation across various sectors during COVID-19 has embarked on the upsurge in its future demands undeniably.

Moreover, experts predict that any economic recession in the future will augment the global adoption of automation capabilities imbibing RPA. Experts, from strategists at leading investment firms to Nobel Laureates, warn of an “imminent” global recession, exacerbated by a US$13 trillion global stockpile of negative-yielding debt. In this downturn, businesses will need to find new ways to increase efficiency, drive revenue, and meet customer needs. With 85% of the RPA market still untapped, the economic slowdown will encourage all businesses to dive into automation. In fact, current Automation Anywhere customers are already increasing investments to hedge against a declining economy.

However, signals from the current financial market don’t paint an optimistic picture.The fall of long-term interest rates and the retraction of corporate investments reflects increasing instability from global tensions, conflicts, and trade wars. If consumer fear takes hold and demand collapses further, the world be facing a much greater recession than that of 2008. Normally, organizations would lay off employees and struggle through, but automation is demonstrating new ways forward. As businesses face the realities of working in an economic downturn, Guy Kirkwood, chief evangelist at UiPath predicts they’ll adapt their business models with automation – which will enable them to scale up robots rather than scale down human employees.

Furthermore, as companies like UiPath are heavily investing right now in helping combat the spread of COVID-19 with the help of its RPA platform and providing its customers timely support as they transition to new operating models. Never has there been more need for software robots to assist hospitals with huge volumes of medical tests processing, or the public authorities with navigating the welfare arrangements for people in need of timely solutions, or the retailers with onboarding thousands of employees that are needed quickly to aid in the crisis. UiPath predicts, as businesses face the realities of working in an economic downturn, in the future, they’ll adapt their business models with automation, enabling them to scale up robots rather than scale down human employees.

In the near future, RPA will drive businesses to be less dependent on individual employee circumstances. Even if one cannot ignore the ‘human-factor’ which determines the creative conscience of the daily necessary work life, some assignments would need to be done fast and without any mistakes. Here, RPA as a fast and flexible way to replicate employee-driven processes with a script will prove its worth. With RPA in your hands, you can delegate critical processes to automation and stop stressing out about its accuracy.

Organizations that have implemented automation previous to this crisis will likely have an easier time dealing with all the nuances of setting up remote work, keep up with similar levels of productivity by relying on automated back-office activities, helping overwhelmed customer support staff with attended automation or front office bots, catering to the increase or decrease of supply chain demand, and many other ways that can help them weather these turbulent times with the help of automated business processes.

The market reports predict that RPA will enable public sector institutions to leverage automation more often to distribute funds to those in need more efficiently, automating qualification and validation processes, updating public health data in real-time, scraping online inventories, etc. Schools and universities will be using automation at the extent to automate their class scheduling, activate in bulk licensing of remote video conference tools for online classes, distributing relevant resources for international students,etc.

Conclusively, as I've observed that the current COVID-19 pandemic is more likely to bring about changes in the work-style of consumers and clients, RPA as a recession-proof technology will cater to their needs every time.

I keep emphasizing the use and benefits of RPA, especially in the current scenario as it doesn't call for a huge investment, optimize human workforce efforts, improves throughput time, and of course, enables multi-fold cost savings.

You want to know more about the use cases, fitment, implementation approach, don't shy away from dropping a line in my inbox. I ensure an interesting and valuable chat if nothing else.

Thanks,

Prakash Jha.

Insights Collected from: BCG, Analytic I. UiPath, IE.