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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
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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
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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
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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
Note: n=50 Source: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Survey in KSA, Blue Prism, Dec 2019
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
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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
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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.
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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
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Figure 5: Use of RPA Across Specific Business Functions
Note: n=50 Source: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Survey in KSA, Blue Prism, Dec 2019
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%
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Figure 6: Business Priorities and Benefits of RPA
Note: n=50 Source: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Survey in KSA, Blue Prism, Dec 2019
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
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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
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Figure 8: Challenges in RPA Adoption
Note: n=50 Source: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Survey in KSA, Blue Prism, Dec 2019
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%
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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.
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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
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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
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research, and events company.
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