Three in five of the organisations in Asia Pacific plan to scale up robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives or achieve enterprise-wide automation deployment by 2025, according to a survey by UiPath, a New York-listed automation software company.
However, 91% of the organisations surveyed do not yet have enterprise-wide RPA deployment in place despite recognising its importance and benefits, said the survey, conducted for UiPath by the IT market research group IDC.
The conclusions were reached in a survey of nine countries: Australia, China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. Fundamentally, 86% of the respondents agreed that automation will be a critical requirement for business excellence, customer experience and competitive success within the next three years.
"While improving operational efficiencies and enriching customer experience have been top of mind for leveraging automation, many organisations also believe that automation is a pathway towards meeting ESG and sustainability goals, which will be a game-changer for corporate trustworthiness," said Michael Araneta, associate vice-president of IDC Financial Insights.
"However, most organisations have been slow in taking the leap into implementing an enterprise-wide automation programme due to myriad yet addressable challenges, including finding automation skills and talent, identifying the right automation software and ensuring robust security and governance."
Automation spending in 2020 and 2021 continued to accelerate, with 67% of organisations having increased spending, the survey found. The top three business priorities for adopting automation were improving operational efficiency (63%), streamlining processes (56%) as well as digitising processes and workflows (48%).
Going forward, automation will play a larger role by driving new revenue streams, deepening existing relationships with customers and achieving operational efficiencies, according to UiPath.
More than 90% of organisations in Australia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and China are also shifting their focus towards intelligent process automation (IPA), the survey found.
Given that the IPA market in the region is estimated to grow to US$5.5 billion in 2025, this highlights the necessity and potential to go beyond RPA to achieve a comprehensive end-to-end process automation at scale. In the next 3 years, 59% of organisations surveyed intend to use IPA in at least 20% of total automation deployments.
TALENT SHORTAGE
However, the talent crunch has become a significant obstacle as many organisations point to the shortage of automation skills and talent (59%) as the top challenge they face in scaling automation.
As a result, 53% said that the availability of skilled automation talent and strong support from implementation partners are key when selecting automation solutions.
Across Asia Pacific, 44% of organisations already have non-IT employees involved in automating aspects of their work, while 39% plan to get their employees involved. In particular, the banking and insurance industry is leading the pack, with 56% of non-IT employees involved in automation, followed by telecommunications (50%) and retail (49%).
As more organisations integrate automation in the work of non-IT employees, respondents highlighted that collaboration with IT (33%), clear guidance on best practices (21%), and easy-to-use tools (19%) are the key requirements for successful implementation.
Additionally, organisations will need to develop a comprehensive training and development plan with a focus on reskilling and upskilling across teams and units, which only 38% of organisations are currently doing.
"Organisations clearly recognise the need to make enterprise-wide automation a reality to realise productivity gains, cost-savings and enhanced customer experience among many other benefits," said Scott Hunter, vice-president for customer strategy and solutions lead in Asia Pacific and Japan at UiPath.
"However, the reality remains that the majority of them are facing challenges to scale automation across all aspects of the business.
"To level up their automation initiatives, organisations must elevate their automation mindset by leveraging a holistic strategy with executive buy-in, coupled with a robust employee upskilling and training programme to automate at scale."