A Review of RPA in 2021

With the year almost over, now is a good time to reflect on the previous 12 months and examine the key highlights in order to help plan for 2022. In this blog post, we will be examining RPA in 2021, specifically by looking at the changes we saw in the market and RPA technology, as well as giving some predictions for where we see RPA in 2022.

Growing Interest

First and foremost, Talos saw a huge spike in interest in RPA in 2021. This was evidenced by the increased number of attendees at our UiPath Academy Live events throughout the year. The increase in interest meant that we were offering these events monthly to a new audience. What was most exciting was that the audience was typically made up of organisations with little-to-no experience with RPA. This gave us good ground for introducing RPA concepts and technology to a brand new audience, many of which were completely unaware of RPA. These events were particularly successful in helping organisations understand their own RPA opportunities, how they could be easily achieved and helping initiate their automation journey.

We also saw more traffic in terms of enquiries about RPA showcases and demo’s. More organisations were interested in seeing what RPA looks like, and we were more than happy to demonstrate our capabilities. These showcases were very good at providing an entry point for conversations around RPA, as well as giving some great real-world examples of automation that apply to most businesses.

New Opportunities

Talos saw a significant increase in RPA project delivery in 2021. We had more projects this year, spread over a variety of different businesses and processes. Key projects this year included:

• Customer Data Migration in Aged Care
• Report Generation in Health Insurance
• Asset Management in Telecommunications
• Invoice Processing in Manufacturing

These projects were all delivered in 2021, and have been instrumental in changing the ways these businesses work. We had a good mix of new and returning customers this year – a good sign that automation produces long-term benefits for businesses, and is not a ‘one-time’ only tool.

We also had quite a few requests for proof-of-concepts (POC) in 2021. Larger businesses typically requested these, along with a process design document, in order to understand the feasibility of implementing RPA in 2021. These POC’s were very helpful to the business, but also to us at Talos, as it broadened our experience with different industries and processes. We now have great experience in automating the ‘Big 3’ business processes:

1. Invoice processing
2. Customer on-boarding
3. Email triage

Expanding Technologies

UiPath underwent some massive upgrades in 2021. Notable improvements were evident in features such as:

• Task Mining
• Process Mining
• Document Understanding

These were our favourite features in 2021, and were pivotal in some of our larger project deliveries. Businesses who leveraged these technologies were reaping immediate rewards through increased processing speed, volume and efficiency.

We also got to work on more projects, which gave us some more experience in automating technologies such as:

• Dynamics CRM
• TechnologyOne
• HAMBS
• Carelink
• Pronto

This is just a brief list of the more significant systems we saw in 2021. We got to experience developing RPA on a variety of different applications and environments – nearly all of it delivered remotely throughout the year. This gave us great experience in knowing how to deliver projects remotely with minimal tech headaches.

On The Horizon

If 2021 is anything to go by, we expect 2022 to be another huge year. In terms of interest, we are already seeing more new customers making enquiries about RPA. It’s very likely we will continue our UiPath Academy Live events each month starting in the new year. Opportunities-wise, our pipeline of work is looking big in 2022 – returning customers making up a large part of that. That trend is likely to continue, as we see organisations continue their automation journey. As for technology, we expect more improvements to the UiPath platform, particularly in the task mining space and process discovery suite. Machine learning and document understanding are the other areas we predict will undergo further improvement and sophistication.

All in all, 2021 was a tremendous year for RPA – lots of interest, plenty of opportunities and massive technological improvements. We here at Talos are looking forward to 2022 and seeing where the road takes us!