Business Process Automation Is On IT Leaders' Road Maps in 2024, But Challenges Remain
Despite hurdles, end-to-end process automation is considered vital to digital transformation.
Ninety percent of IT decision-makers said they will ramp up Business Process Automation (BPA) investments within the next two years, according to a recent survey released by Camunda as part of its "2024 State of Process Orchestration" report.
Among 866 survey respondents, including IT and other business leaders, 96 percent said automation is vital to digital transformation; 91 percent said they've seen business growth using process automation in the past year; and 93 percent said automation helped them improve customer experiences.
Gartner forecasted the BPA software market will grow from a $2.6 billion industry as of 2022 to $3.6 billion by 2027 in its "Market Guide for Business Process Automation Tools" 2023 report.
While there are major players in the BPA market—Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce all offer automation services—there are newer vendors focused not only on larger enterprise customers but also the midmarket, like Germany-based Camunda, which specializes in business process orchestration.
Camunda's chief technologist, Bernd Ruecker, spoke with MES Computing about their company's approach to BPA for customers.
BPA Challenges
Process automation, Ruecker said, consists of two parts: process orchestration and task automation.
"A customer may say, 'We have tasks, we want to do them in the right sequence,'" he said. "That's when we focus on process orchestration."
Process orchestration can help with the one of the biggest challenges around implementing a BPA strategy—reining in discrete processes that may already be deployed and not working cohesively.
Ruecker cited Deutsche Telekom as an example and talked about what it called its "spaghetti pot automation"—lots of bots deployed and communicating in a very complex way nobody understood, he said.
"That is where process orchestration comes into play" he said, "controlling these different bots. Some customers start with process orchestration. [A] prime example: if you want to open up a bank account, we've worked with a lot of banks, they have these customer on-boarding processes ... certain things have to be done in the right sequence. And this is very often still a very manual process, where you push emails to people, where you send documents around where you have to sign up for things. And they start by pulling that into the orchestration layer, saying, 'OK, we have to do this, whatever 20, 30, 40 steps'. So we define those steps [and] control that with the orchestration software," Ruecker explained.
The second part, he said, is pinpointing which business tasks can still be done by humans and which can be fully automated.
"We might have task lists ... pushing [them] on Slack or Microsoft Teams. Or it might be an API call to a system where we really automate things, or it might be RPA [robotic process automation] like having bots … steering user interfaces ... you kind of need both to automate processes."
Other challenges survey respondents cited with BPA were complexity with legacy systems, processes spanning across multiple systems, budget concerns, and disconnect between IT decision-makers and business leaders.
IT Leaders Still Remain Convinced Of Need For BPA For Digital Transformation
Despite challenges, many of those surveyed said they have seen the benefits of adopting a solid BPA strategy. Ninety-one percent said they have seen increased business growth with process automation within the last year; 95 percent said automation helped them achieve operational efficiency; and 93 percent said automation helped improve the customer experience.
As a midmarket IT leader, what has been your experience with Business Process Automation? We'd love to hear from you! Share your experiences by registering for free at the MES IT Leadership Network or contact [email protected]