Robotic process automation (RPA) - making use of relevant automation technologies goes beyond the simple screen scrapping and basic workflow automation technology, and successfully mimics the relevant back-office tasks of the human workers, assisting in performing high volume repetitive tasks. These tasks could include form filling, logging into the applications, data entry and extraction, data copying between two relevant applications, amongst others. RPA assists in the recording of the task or human process within a software script, which could be executed and deployed along different runtimes. Quadrant Knowledge Solutions defines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a software technology which enables the designing, building, deployment and maintenance of software scripts (also referred to as software bots). These bots can learn, mimic, execute and automate repeatable, high volume and rules-based - business and IT processes, by observing the human digital actions, and can interact with applications or systems similar to human interactions across various business functions, performing tactical task automation.

RPA has already achieved global acceptance across industry verticals, and furthermore, enterprises are actively looking to implement RPA within their daily operations, post gauging its end-to-end benefits. Some of the key parameters that enterprises are actively keen to evaluate the RPA deployments on would be its ability for being data-intensive, rules-driven, repetitive and highly compliant. The ultimate selection of the particular RPA suites would be decided on the return on investment (ROI) of the particular enterprise automation programme, and its credibility as well. It has been observed that the general awareness about enterprise level RPA implementations is severely lacking, and that as such, the RPA deployments should ideally start by setting exact project expectations. Simply put, for green signalling the RPA implementations, businesses need to clearly define the exact processes which require automation. Additionally, exact purpose/ expected outcome from the RPA implementation could also be gauged in detail (somewhat similar to Six Sigma projects implementation).

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, have identified, researched, and analysed 21 significant RPA vendors in the market and evaluated them on the SPARK Matrix: Robotic Process Automation, 2023 report. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps application and software engineering leaders to make informed buying decisions and select the right vendor based on their needs. QKS have evaluated the vendors on various parameters of technology excellence and customer impact scale. These parameters include some of the major focus areas and use cases that the vendors provide, such as their ability to provide workflow process orchestration and administration, seamless integrations with existing enterprise applications, and provision of a dedicated design studio amongst other things. The parameters also include making sure that vendors are providing low-code/ no-code capabilities, exclusive support for attended and unattended automation, and dedicated provision of task mining capabilities. Some other factors taken into consideration while evaluating the potential and best possible vendor fit would be the ability to support self-healing bots and unstructured data processing promoting strengthened bot health, ease of Implementation and maintenance, and the ability for applying retrainable AI,ML and NLP models.

Quadrant Analysts believe that the actual implementation of RPA requires a thorough cultural shift for majority of the enterprises who would normally be half way in their total technological transformation journeys. Thus, a detailed step-by-step approach is required for the right process selection which could be automated through RPA. Firstly, the vision and main business requirement for the RPA implementation should be identified and passed down through coaching and training the primary stakeholders. This assumes particular importance since the goals for RPA implementation of various business groups may vary, within the range of – scaling the business, achieving regulatory compliance, attaining baseline performance targets, enhancing the customer experience and enriching the process efficiency, amongst others. Secondly, setting up a dedicated governance group would ensure selection of appropriate and RPA worthy processes, leading to appropriately defining an official accountability and responsibility framework assisting further seamless adoption of RPA. Thirdly, the selection of apt implementation partners and technology vendors possessing hands-on enterprise RPA implementation experience ensures avoidance of peculiar pitfalls in the process at any given point of time. Lastly, having defined frameworks and checklists ensures undertaking of rules-driven processes, for achieving maximised ROI from the RPA.

According to Apoorva Dawalbhakta, Associate Director (Research) at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions, “End-users for the RPA offerings are actively looking out for - robust governance features that support both federated and centralized automation governance models, and reduced barrier for adoption of RPA technology promoting flexible adoption options enabling enterprises to incorporate unattended and attended automation inside their core application frameworks.” He further adds, “Vendors should also actively provide a unified automation centre which boosts multivendor automation value by integrating automation across third party vendors for enhanced business impact and simplified automation lifecycle management through the consolidation of enterprise-wide automation opportunities. Additionally, provision of key features including – the provision of an intelligent process recorder, computer vision coupled with pattern recognition, AI and ML based native OCR, and an advanced embedded business process management (BPM) engine, would further add value to the end-user product experience.”

To learn more details about the vendors’ advanced capabilities, differentiating factors and technology trends shaping the future of the RPA market, we are delighted to announce the publication of SPARK Matrix: Robotic Process Automation, 2023 report. We have done a detailed analysis of each of the vendor’s strengths, technical offerings, strategic and technical roadmap, organizational potential and weaknesses before placing them on the SPARK Matrix graph. We also conduct briefing calls and circulate RFI questionnaires to back our analysis with the precise and relevant primary customer and end-user data. 

Author : Apoorva Dawalbhakta , Associate Director at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions