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RPA: The Key to Delivering

Automation and Achieving

Greater Operational Efficiency

Executive Summary

Automation has become a focal point for organizations across the globe, and

Saudi Arabia is no exception. Technologies such as cloud, the Internet of

Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and

machine learning (ML) are becoming pervasive as organizations look to

enhance both internal and external services and drive greater operational

and process efficiencies. RPA and AI-enabled RPA adoption is gaining traction

in the Kingdom, with both the public and private sectors — especially banking

and finance, oil & gas, retail, and other consumer-centric or process-oriented

sectors — embracing the technology in a bid to boost their efficiency levels.

RPA is proving to be a game changer within Saudi Arabia's overall digital

transformation strategies. According to IDC, spending on RPA in Saudi Arabia

is set to reach $27.4 million in 2023, increasing at a compound annual growth

rate (CAGR) of 56% from 2019. By using RPA and AI-enabled RPA, the Saudi

government is not only accelerating the realization of its Vision 2030 plan, but

also bringing automation to a variety government services. This ties in with its

stated aim of enabling a superior quality of life for its citizens by providing

fast and efficient public services. Automation through RPA and AI sits at the

heart of the $500 billion megaproject 'NEOM', which strives to create an

intelligent and smart city built around technology. However, this is just one

example; RPA can be effectively used in various other nationwide projects in

various areas such as oil and gas, energy, and banking and finance to bring

about automation and reduce costs.

As RPA is becoming more intelligent with AI embedded into the platform, it is

introducing a new wave of transformation across industries. The major

factors driving strong RPA adoption in the Kingdom will undoubtedly be the

desire for automation to minimize costs, improve operational efficiency,

realize greater customer satisfaction, and effectively leverage large volumes

of data. Emerging technologies like RPA will strongly help Saudi organizations

to maximize the benefits of automation in the longer run. And organizations

that fail to embrace automation will lag behind their rivals and lose their

competitive edge.

Sponsored by: Blue Prism

Author:

Manish Ranjan

February 2020

IDC White Paper RPA: The Key to Delivering Automation and Achieving Greater Operational Efficiency

#META45972720 ©2020 IDC. www.idc.com/mea Page 2

Contents

Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................................................... 1

Methodology ................................................................................................................................................................. 3

Situation Overview ........................................................................................................................................................ 3

The Role of Technology in Driving Greater Automation .......................................................................................... 4

Increasing Traction of RPA for Automation ............................................................................................................... 4

RPA Simplified ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 4

Overall Market Opportunity for RPA in the Kingdom ................................................................................................................................................... 5

Current and Planned RPA Adoption in the Kingdom .................................................................................................................................................... 6

Adoption of RPA Across Business Functions .................................................................................................................................................................. 7

How Organizations Can Achieve Their Business Goals and Benefit from RPA Technology ................................ 8

Shift Towards Intelligent Automation (AI-Enabled Intelligent RPA) ............................................................................................................................ 9

Key Challenges of RPA Adoption ............................................................................................................................... 10

About Blue Prism ........................................................................................................................................................ 11

Essential Guidance ...................................................................................................................................................... 12

About IDC ..................................................................................................................................................................... 13

List of Figures

Figure 1: Survey Demographics ............................................................................................................................... 3

Figure 2: Maturity Automation Adoption in Saudi Arabia .................................................................................... 4

Figure 3: Saudi Arabia RPA Market, 2019-2023 ($M) ............................................................................................. 5

Figure 4: Level of Adoption of RPA and Area of RPA Adoption ............................................................................ 7

Figure 5: Use of RPA Across Specific Business Functions ..................................................................................... 8

Figure 6: Business Priorities and Benefits of RPA .................................................................................................. 9

Figure 7: Shift Towards Intelligent RPA ................................................................................................................. 10

Figure 8: Challenges in RPA Adoption ................................................................................................................... 11



Methodology

In preparing this white paper, IDC drew upon its continuous research on the use of RPA technology in

Saudi Arabia. Additionally, IDC conducted extensive secondary research as well as a survey among

CIOs, heads of IT, and IT directors across 50 organizations from the following sectors: banking,

insurance, and finance; government; and oil & gas and energy. The objective of the research was to

understand the emerging trends and factors driving or inhibiting the adoption of RPA solutions that

enable organizations to bring automation and empower employees to shift their focus away from

mundane and repetitive tasks towards more strategic roles.

Figure 1: Survey Demographics

Note: n=50 Source: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Survey in KSA, Blue Prism, Dec 2019

Situation Overview

Saudi Arabia is undergoing a lot of transformational changes as part of its long-term digitization and

modernization strategy under the Vision 2030 initiative. In realizing the country's short-term

modernization plans as part of its National Transformation Program (NTP), emerging technologies

such as cloud, mobility, analytics, and social have increasingly been used. The emergence of

disruptive technologies such as RPA, AI, ML, IoT, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) has also

opened up a new paradigm for organizations to accelerate their digital transformation (DX) journeys

as they strive to revamp their customer engagement, improve their operational efficiency, and

redesign their business models. According to the latest RPA survey conducted by IDC, more than 90%

of participant organizations are either already implementing some sort of DX initiatives or are poised

to embark on their DX journey in the next two years. Organizations are focused on improving

customer service innovation, organizational innovation, and product/service innovation as part of

their DX initiatives. Automation is the key to achieving these priorities as it empowers employees and

frees up line-of-business leaders to focus on more strategic objectives rather than spending time on

mundane, repetitive tasks.

58%

14%

28%

Organization Size

250–499 employees

500–999 employees

1,000 employees or more

42%

30%

28%

Verticals

Banking, Insurance, and Finance

Government

Oil & Gas, Energy



The Role of Technology in Driving Greater

Automation

As organizations become more data centric due to the ever-increasing volume and variety of data, the

importance of data management and analytics for effective utilization becomes paramount. There is a

shift towards autonomous solutions that can bring about greater levels of efficiency and agility.

Organizations need to take action in real-time, proactively to meet business opportunities in time and

be hyper-agile. At the same time, businesses today are deploying emerging technologies in order to

reduce their operational costs and increase departmental and organizational efficiency. These are the

major drivers behind the increasing adoption of RPA, AI, and machine learning.

Figure 2: Maturity Automation Adoption in Saudi Arabia


The survey shows that 38% of respondents believe that the use of automation solutions within their

organizations is limited as most of their work is manual and labor intensive. Around 10% of

organizations are at the experimentation phase of using technologies to automate tasks and

processes, while 6% have either a well-defined proof-of-concept in place or are running some pilot

programs at the departmental level. It is interesting to note that almost a quarter of the surveyed

organizations have a well-established center of excellence in place that supports an enterprise-wide

automation strategy across a broad range of use cases.

Increasing Traction of RPA for Automation

RPA Simplified

IDC defines robotic process automation as a class of software designed to automate or augment

repetitive manual tasks. Those tasks may be individual tasks executed by a knowledge worker outside

the context of a business process; alternatively, they may replace a task that is currently manually

performed by process participants in an enterprise application or a custom business process.

A software robot or "bot" is defined as a unit of automation that executes a set of discrete commands

to perform routine tasks automatically. Bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally

38% 10% 6% 20% 26%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Level 1 - Use of technology to automate work is negligible (most work is manual and labor-intensive)

Level 2 - At experimentation phase of using technology to automate work

Level 3 - Well-defined proof of concept and/or pilot programs for automation but at the department level

Level 4 - Technology is available enterprise-wide to automate tasks and/or processes, but use cases are limited

Level 5 - A well-established center of excellence supports enterprise-wide automation with broad range of use cases



repetitive at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone, and more consistently

than a team of workers tasked with performing the same repetitive work, where the task lends itself

to automation. When RPA is successfully implemented, the quality of work is more consistent and

error rates are reduced.

RPA bots provide the following capabilities:

» Carry out instructions and interact directly with applications that are used in the automation.

Bots can open, act upon, and close applications and can extract, process, and pass data

between applications, documents, and databases.

» Perform optical character recognition (OCR), which may include text analytics capabilities, to

capture data from documents and images.

» Screen scrape to extract data from the desktop, browser application, and website screens.

» Call AI models, including natural language processing, speech processing, image processing,

and other activities that capture, digitize, and produce information models that originate in an

unstructured format.

Source: IDC's Worldwide Software Taxonomy, 2018 Update (Feb 2019)

Overall Market Opportunity for RPA in the Kingdom

The deployment of RPA technology is a global phenomenon and Saudi Arabia is no different. IDC’s

Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker from November 2019 shows that spending RPA solutions in

Saudi Arabia totaled $4.6 million in 2019 and is poised to reach $27.4 million in 2023. This represents

an almost six-fold increase and a strong CAGR of 56%.

Figure 3: Saudi Arabia RPA Market, 2019-2023 ($M)

Source: IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker, Nov 2019

$4.6

$27.4

2019 2023



Current and Planned RPA Adoption in the Kingdom

The effective use of RPA can deliver greater accuracy and operational efficiency to functions such as

payment processing, loan underwriting, pricing, procurement, accounting data processing, creation of

purchase orders, and customer service delivery. With RPA solutions, organizations have digital

workers that can perform repetitive and back-office tasks day-in and day-out without any human

supervision.

In markets like Saudi Arabia, demand for automation software such as RPA is evolving. According to

the survey, over 50% of organizations have already deployed an RPA solution across their entire

organization, deployed an RPA solution within a few business departments, or are currently

evaluating relevant RPA use cases as decision makers see potential benefit in the technology’s future

utilization. Furthermore, 16% of organizations are planning to deploy RPA solutions in the next two

years.

However, over 30% of organizations are not sure about their future plans around the deployment of

RPA bots or solutions. This scenario is mostly observed in the oil & gas sector, where the proportion

was as high as 57%. However, while oil & gas respondents were the least likely to have firm future

plans for RPA, they were also the most engaged in terms of evaluating the technology. This could

signify high intent to adopt RPA if they identify use cases and solutions that are relevant for them. The

public sector has the highest rates of both current RPA use and planned future use, followed by the

banking sector.



Figure 4: Level of Adoption of RPA and Area of RPA Adoption

Note: for Fig 1. n=50; for Fig 2. n=34 Source: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Survey in KSA, Blue Prism, Dec 2019

Some 50% of the surveyed organizations said that their RPA solutions or initiatives are led by the IT

department. Meanwhile, 41% of the respondents highlighted the important role that various lines of

business (LoBs) and departments play in collaborating with IT to drive RPA initiatives and adoption

within their organizations.

Adoption of RPA Across Business Functions

The top business priorities of Saudi-based organizations are the need to increase customer

acquisition and outreach, improve the customer experience, enhance collaboration across

departments, and improve business process automation. RPA can contribute to each of these

priorities, enhancing efficiency and agility across the organization. Process-intensive departments

such as finance and accounting, customer support, quality and process improvement, HR, and sales

are the key business functions where RPA can be most effective.

The oil & gas and energy sector can benefit a lot from the deployment of RPA within the finance and

accounting function, given the intense activity that is seen in the space in the Kingdom. For the

government sector, RPA is of paramount importance for IT management, quality and process

improvement, and customer/citizen care.

32%

20%

16%

2%4%

26%

0%

100%

Level of Adoption of RPA

RPA is used across the

organization (RPA at scale)

Have multiple RPA bots across

functional domains and

business groups

Have a few RPA bots in

operation in one or two

functional domains

Planning to launch within the

next 2 years

Currently evaluating; will be

launched within 2020

No robotic process automation

(RPA) planned yet

6%

50%

41%

3%

Who is Driving RPA

Functional/line of business

IT

Both IT and functional/line of business

Development center



Figure 5: Use of RPA Across Specific Business Functions


Customer-centric sectors like banking and government are heavy users of RPA to support their

customer care functions. Conversely, the oil & gas and energy sector sees much less adoption of RPA

for customer care and support purposes.

How Organizations Can Achieve Their Business Goals

and Benefit from RPA Technology

Organizations in Saudi Arabia face a lot of challenges when it comes to process alignment and

integrating data and various applications, which tends to result in silos among various departments

and within the overall organization. This not only adversely impacts the organization's efficiency and

performance, but also negatively impacts inter- and intra-departmental collaboration. The use of RPA

addresses these organizational challenges, while simultaneously improving business process

automation and enhancing the overall customer experience.

8%

16%

16%

24%

28%

32%

32%

46%

46%

50%

54%

Audit and Compliance

Sourcing/Procurement

Supply Chain Management (SCM)/Inventory Management

Product Development (or R&D)

Marketing and Communications

HR Management

Sales and Business Development

IT Management

Quality and Process Improvement

Customer Care

Finance and Accounting

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%



Figure 6: Business Priorities and Benefits of RPA


The survey respondents identified improvements in customer satisfaction as the topmost benefit of

deploying RPA. By reducing repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks, organizations not only save

time and money, they also enable employees to focus on more important tasks like client

management and service customization. The implementation of automation processes and

operations also helps organizations to reduce human error and mitigate risk.

Shift Towards Intelligent Automation (AI-Enabled Intelligent RPA)

By IDC's definition, RPA is a sub-market of intelligent process automation (IPA) that falls within its

labor-centric automation segment. Within this, the technology is becoming more intelligent as digital

workers not only automate human work but are also augmenting human work based on AI

capabilities.

As deployments of AI and cognitive solutions based on machine learning increase, demand for

intelligent solutions capable of self-learning/self-healing will rise from organizations looking to enable

true digital transformation. This will eventually have an impact on RPA market landscape as

organizations search for solutions that can provide meaningful insights by efficiently analyzing not

only structured data, but large pools of unstructured data too. The automation of processes for data

management and data analysis is delivering consistent benefits such as operational efficiency and

cost reduction, flexibility in managing peak workloads (back office), and improvements in customer

satisfaction (front office).

30%

34%

40%

40%

46%

46%

Better cost management

and reduce expenses

Productivity and efficiency

improvement

Improving customer

experience

Better business processes

automation

Increase collaboration

across departments

Integration and alignment

of data and applications

Business Priorities RPA Supports

16%

42%

46%

48%

52%

52%

Flexibility/multitasking

Operational

efficiency/turnaround time

Cost reduction

Quality/accuracy/risk

mitigation

Continuous service

Improved customer

satisfaction

Business Benefits RPA Brings



Figure 7: Shift Towards Intelligent RPA

Source: IDC, 2019

Although the majority of the survey respondents hold a positive view of how effective RPA is at

processing data and tasks, this view varies depending on the data type. The highest level of

confidence is in RPA's effectiveness at processing structured and semi-structured data, while the

lowest level is for unstructured data. To address this, RPA solution providers are making their

platforms more intelligent by continuously investing in AI capabilities, improving user interfaces to

enable human-machine interactions, and embedding AI to offer predictive and prescriptive analytics

for decision-centric automation.

Key Challenges of RPA Adoption

One of the key challenges around RPA adoption is cost; be it in terms of upfront costs or the costs of

rolling out the technology on an organization-wide level. The second major challenge is the lack of

talent with the right skills; this could be caused by a general lack of awareness or the unavailability of

effective RPA use cases.

REPETITIVE TASKS

Structured Data &

Processes

Unstructured Data &

Processes

Intelligent Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Cognitive Automation

ASSISTING / AUGMENTING HUMANS

AI CAN DO BETTERTHAN HUMANS

Back-office tasks

Order entry

Claims processing

Helpdesk assistance

Sentiment analysis

Customer segmentation

Virtual service agents

Recommendation engines

Fraud detection



Figure 8: Challenges in RPA Adoption


Some of the major setbacks to RPA adoption are caused by the existence of legacy systems and

outdated IT infrastructure that minimizes the possibilities of leveraging RPA. Aside from these, the

overall RPA ecosystem and use cases around the technology are still evolving and many organizations

are still not completely aware of the various areas where they can deploy RPA to automate their

business processes and operations.

Most of these challenges can be addressed by developing thorough strategic plans and

roadmaps that detail how to realize the potential of RPA solutions in relation to the

organizational setup. As the RPA ecosystem matures, and benefits are witnessed after a few

successful deployments, there will be a ripple effect whereby adoption of this technology will

multiply.

About Blue Prism

Blue Prism's vision is to provide a digital workforce for every enterprise. The company's purpose

is to unleash the collaborative potential of humans, operating in harmony with a digital workforce,

so every enterprise can exceed their business goals and drive meaningful growth, with unmatched

speed and agility.

Fortune 500 and public-sector organizations, among enterprise customers operating in over 70

countries and across 70 commercial sectors, trust Blue Prism's enterprise-grade connected-RPA

platform. By strategically applying intelligent automation, these organizations are creating new

opportunities and services, while unlocking massive efficiencies that return millions of hours of

work back into their business.

8%

10%

16%

22%

26%

34%

38%

40%

Lack of top management buy-in

Our employees are reluctant to embrace these solutions (resistance to

change)

Inefficiency in integrating digital workforces, without disruption to

business-as-usual activity

We don't know enough about how we can get value out of AI-enabled

RPA solutions

We still see AI-enabled RPA technologies and vendors as too immature

The IT systems modernization/architectural changes needed are too

cumbersome/expensive

Lack of staff with the right skills

The upfront costs are prohibitive

0% 10% 20% 30% 40%



Comprised of interoperable digital workers capable of multitasking, adapting to the changing

demand in tasks as needed, working in teams, identifying and recovering from failures, and

carrying out business process automations at all levels, the connected-RPA platform is system and

application agnostic and encapsulates artificial intelligence and machine learning, including drag-

and-drop access to third-party technologies from the Blue Prism Digital Exchange.

Available on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, or as an integrated SaaS solution, Blue Prism's digital

workforce automates ever more complex, end-to-end processes that drive a true digital

transformation, collaboratively, at scale and across the entire enterprise.

Visit www.blueprism.com to learn more or follow Blue Prism on Twitter @blue_prism and on LinkedIn

(AIM: PRSM).

Essential Guidance

IDC offers the following guidance to organizations considering the implementation of RPA solutions:

» Align Automation with Organizational DX and Other Strategic Initiatives: Build a

comprehensive and scalable automation plan within the organization. Identify the repetitive,

mundane, and time-consuming processes that not only minimize productivity but also strain

the workforce. Create a comprehensive and scalable automation plan that addresses these

challenges and provides an agile, employee-friendly environment where processes can be

automated.

» Define Business Requirements and Relevant Use Cases: Before selecting any RPA solution,

organizations need to understand their current and future business needs and determine

what exactly they want to achieve from any RPA implementation. Once functional areas have

been identified and the capability and affordability of a solution have been evaluated, the

organization should create an effective implementation plan.

» Act Tactically – Don’t Go Full Throttle on RPA Adoption: Identify the specific business functions

and start with a few RPA bots to measure the ROI and benefits. Start at a lower scale, evaluate

the interoperability with other applications/solutions and alignment with other automation

processes, and measure the benefits. Based on these, secure buy-in from other departments

to drive the required change management. Realize the benefit and then expand RPA

deployment across multiple departments and eventually across the entire organization.

» Ensure the Right RPA Vendor is Selected: It is important to choose the right RPA solution

provider after evaluating how effectively the provider understands the organization's

business processes, current use of technologies, organizational culture, available talent, and

key challenges that need to be addressed.

» Prioritize Ease of Implementation and Friendly User Interface: It is extremely important for

organizations to select an RPA solution that is easy to use (by LoB leaders and employees

alike), easy to integrate with existing systems, and does not require extensive technical know-

how training. Having a solution that requires no coding capabilities or deep technical skills

helps the organization to overcome the skills challenge and scale the level of automation

efficiently and swiftly.

http://www.blueprism.com/



About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory

services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology

markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-

based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts

provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in

over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients

achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media,

research, and events company.

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