Defining Enterprise RPA

8 May 2018
by Manu Aggarwal, Amardeep Modi, Somya Bhadola

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has quickly risen to the top of mind of senior executives in almost all business ecosystems. It is not all hype – many enterprises have successfully developed use-cases and deployed & leveraged RPA for efficiency and other objectives. Most deployments are initiated by business units wishing to automate transactional and rules-based processes that can be entirely delegated to bots in unattended mode. However, for certain complex and security-sensitive processes, bots might need to be deployed in attended mode.

These successful deployments, and their subsequent benefits, have encouraged enterprises to scale their RPA initiatives up and out, but doing so is not without its challenges. The situation raises multiple questions for enterprises:

  • Do vendors have solutions that can be deployed in a scalable manner?
  • How much involvement from IT would be required or can business users implement such initiatives without significant IT involvement?
  • Are the solutions secure?
  • Could enterprise’s governance structure and regulatory requirements be embedded in the robots?
  • Is it possible to keep existing legacy systems and applications untouched when deploying an enterprise-wide RPA?
  • Are the requisite RPA skills available, either internally or externally?

As RPA is deployed across industries to automate many different types of processes, RPA solution developers and providers need to better understand what their customers value most and why. Initial research and conversations on automation solutions led to the development of a class of solutions often referred to as enterprise RPA. While an understanding of enterprise RPA has formed on the supply side of the market, with software vendors adding features to their solutions, less is known about what enterprises value. This paper provides the findings of a survey-based research project that Everest Group undertook to understand what enterprises value as the most important features of RPA software. The paper includes:

  • Overview of the methodology and the research
  • Introduction and the business case for enterprise-oriented RPA and how businesses define it
  • Five groups of features of RPA software that formed the dimensions that Everest Group used to check enterprises preferences and their relative overall significance
  • Beyond the technological dimensions, the factors that contribute to making an RPA solution enterprise-fit

RPA technology providers can leverage this report to understand what features of RPA solutions enterprises value most. Similarly, enterprises can use this report to discern how their peers have rated the various features, what functionalities to look for when choosing an RPA solution, and how these solutions could help address business needs.

Membership(s)

Service Optimization Technologies (SOT)

 

Page Count: 21