As organizations grapple with increasing business complexities and disruptions, the importance of business processes that form the core of how enterprises run, has increased as well. Executives have realized that to build an agile enterprise, they need to run best-in-class processes and have robust visibility and control over these processes. In our recently published SAPinsider CIO agenda report, process efficiency and visibility emerged as the number one imperative on the agenda of CIOs, as shown in figure 1 . And that translates into a need to invest in tools and solutions that can help build best-in-class processes and process visibility. Figure 1: Top technology leader priorities 2022

Source: SAPinsider research May 2020 and June 2021

SAPinsider recognized the imperative of this strategic capability early on and we have been publishing our benchmark report, “Process Automation State of The Market”, since 2020. The 2022 edition of the report is scheduled to be published later this month. You can participate in the research by taking the research survey. In this article, we review three key trends that we noticed emerging between 2020 and 2021that emphasize the increasing importance of process automation solutions.

Trend I. Adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platforms Increased Significantly in 2021

Between 2020 and 2021, the percentage of respondents who indicated that they are yet to embrace process automation in some form, decreased significantly, as evident from figure 2. This decrease translates into an increase in percentages for categories like RPA and Intelligent Automation. The increase in intelligent and cognitive automation adoption was the most significant, thanks to the ever-increasing interest in AI and ML technologies and the value that they bring to the process automation solutions landscape. Figure 2: Process automation technology adoption areas 2020 vs 2021

Source: SAPinsider research May 2020 and June 2021

 

Trend II: Process Quality Emerged as The Most Important Measure of Success in 2021

As validated from the SAPinsider CIO agenda report, the importance of process efficiency has become a top imperative. An efficient process, within minimal repetitive manual tasks & touchpoints drives productivity of employees associated with the process. Minimizing errors within the process, and hereby increasing process quality not only helps improve process efficiency but also helps improve process quality. So, it is not surprising that process productivity and quality emerge as top two measures of success for process automation for SAPinsiders, as shown in figure 3. Figure 3: Top drivers for process automation 2020 vs 2021

Source: SAPinsider research May 2020 and June 2021

Figure 2 shows the top two business drivers highlighted by SAPinsiders in 2020 and 2021. As we can see in the figure, between 2020 and 2021, process quality driver has increased in importance, and we expect that to be the trend this year as well. As many SAPinsiders indicated in our regular cadence of conversations with them, the critical role of best-in-class business processes in reducing business complexities and risks has become much more evident recently. This has increased the focus on process quality.

 Trend III. Supply Chain Processes Joined Financial Processes in Top Focus Areas in 2021

 While we aggregated processes in higher-level buckets in 2021, one aspect that emerged in 2021 was the increasing importance of supply chain process in the top candidates for process automation. This can be attributed to the massive supply chain disruptions that originated in 2020 and have been ongoing since then. These disruptions accentuated the need for creating best-in-class supply chain processes and end-to-end supply chain visibility. Process automation can help lay the foundation for developing these capabilities. Table 1: Top five candidate processes for process automation 2020 vs 2021 What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders? Process automation has certainly emerged rapidly as a strategic tool during the last few years and that trend will only accelerate from here. While the survey for the process automation state of the market 2022 report is still open, we expect to see the following trends in this year’s report:

• We will continue to see increase in adoption of RPA. The percentage of increase in adoption of intelligent and cognitive automation may not be as sharp as previous year
• Employee productivity will continue to be among the top measures of success for process automation
• Owing to the massive disruptions that supply chains have experienced, we will continue to see increased interest in automation of supply chain processes

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