Larger Companies Spending $1 Million Annually on RPA, Microsoft the Preferred RPA Platform Provider
Blueprint Software Systems – a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions designed to help large organizations understand and improve their business processes – published its “State of Automation in 2022” report, examining the size of companies’ robotic process automation (RPA) estates, their RPA operating costs, internal RPA ownership, and plans for future automation investment.
Blueprint surveyed 400 executives, directors, department heads, senior managers, and analysts across North America and Europe. Those surveyed were from companies ranging from 1,000 – 10,000+ employees. Key report findings include:
• Size of Automation Estates – On average, companies had 120 automated processes currently in production, suggesting that these organizations have significant digital workforces. The top 10 percent of respondents reported having more than 251 automations in their estates.
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• Annual Spend on Automation – The average annual spend on RPA is $480,000. In the highest tier, however, 13 percent of respondents reported spending more than $1 million on RPA annually, the majority of which were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees. Smaller businesses with under 1,000 employees reported spending $100,000-$400,000 on RPA annually, while those in the mid-sized range (999-5000 employees) fell into the $500,000-$999,000 range in terms of annual investment for their automation programs.
• Organizational Ownership of RPA – The most common business units to own RPA are IT (36 percent), given their major role in automation’s implementation and management, and Finance & Accounting (35 percent), having been the initial adopters and automation champions.• The Most Used RPA Platforms – Even though Microsoft’s existence in the RPA space has been relatively short, the reduced licensing fees which significantly lower the total cost of ownership for automation, extensibility with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem through native automations, and ease of use places Microsoft Power Automate in the leadership position.
• Organizations with Multi-Platform Strategies – Forty percent reported that their organizations were using multiple RPA platforms. The top reasons for multi-platform strategies are that specialized tools are being used for specific use cases and that different tools offer better compatibility with enterprise architecture.
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• Plans for Future Automation Investment – Future automation investments will focus on improving RPA governance, automating more complex, end-to-end processes, and applying RPA more broadly across the business and achieving scale. Additionally, more than 20 percent of organizations included RPA re-platforming as one of their main objectives.
“With larger automation estates, the total cost of ownership for RPA and a strong desire to automate more complex, end-to-end business processes, organizations are looking to newer generation, intelligent automation platforms,” says Dan Shimmerman, President and CEO, Blueprint. “The automation space is quickly moving beyond task-based automation to complete, end-to-end intelligent automation with the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate decision-based business processes.”