RPA and BPM are relationally valuable in helping organisations transform customer experience and grow revenues.

Whilst, BPM and RPA together may provide benefits independently, under the right circumstances and implementation strategy they can provide extended benefits when implemented together. This concept is being considered by leading companies and government organizations in the Middle East to automate their operations and processes through a large-scale, iterative change to achieve significant impacts.

RPA is gaining traction globally thanks to the wide number of use cases and relatively low technical threshold for initial adoption.

Using the right approach where viable repeatable tasks are redesigned in a much more strategic, structured and holistic manner, BPM lays the groundwork for RPA. Moreover, an intelligent BPM workflow setup can bring an organization to a higher level of automated efficiency than it ever thought possible by understanding and triggering opportunities for RPA bots to automate processes that it has optimized.

BPM benefits:

• Enable top-notch analysis and optimization of operational processes

• Focuses on remodelling and/ or redesigning processes to raise productivity and reduce needless complexity.

• Delivers significant long-term benefits in operational cost reduction, enterprise activity, regulatory compliance capabilities, and more

• Requires a long adoption period, high technical skills, and investments to overhaul the organization over time.

RPA benefits:

• Configures high-volume, single tasks for automated completion

• Focuses on taking high-volume, repetitive rules-based tasks out of human hands before completing them more efficiently.

• Delivers superior advances in speed, accuracy, reliability, and scalability of all tasks proper for automation. Replace massive human workload.

• Face low barriers to entry due to the inherent flexibility and seamless nature of current and emerging RPA tools. Require a high level of investment of resources to leverage the technology entirely.

Combined approach benefits:

• Enables a holistic approach to operational process improvement that targets both complex and simple tasks to fundamentally overhaul the organization's existing setup.

• Creates a synergistic setup where the organization can comprehensively and continuously optimize its processes and automate all viable tasks with increasing rapidity.

• Represents a highly technical and resource-intensive implementation that offers extensive rewards if done correctly.

• Delivers a potent combination of short-term efficiency gains alongside long-term holistic improvements of the organization's overall health via process improvement and staff development.

What is the Middle East’s market appetite for this combined approach?

When looking at the market scale, both RPA and BPM solutions are healthy business models on the rise globally, and the Middle East is a critical region in both cases. RPA is expected to hit an annual market valuation of $8.78 billion globally by 2026, representing a massive CAGR of 26% for the 2018-2026 period. While older and more established, The BPM market was valued at USD 3.38 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach a value of USD 4.78 billion by 2026 and grow at a CAGR of 6.26% over the forecast period (2021-2026). 1

RPA and BPM are increasingly attractive to ME-based businesses, and government institutions can elect to go with separate implementations or a combined approach. There are three principal factors to consider when evaluating this:

• Sophisticated and cost-efficient: The pandemic and rising consumer expectations across the region means that improving CX whilst cutting operational costs without compromising on flexibility or capability is now essential. Automation is a priority for organizations whose significant and rapid growth has left them with siloed data and growing inefficiencies.

• Skill development of employees: By focusing on BPM to improve operational processes while letting RPA take non-creative 'drudge work' out of human hands, organizations can upskill their local workers. The development will make them a more dynamic, empowered talent pool suitable for the future challenges of the emerging digital industrial revolution. This outcome is desired both at the government level and by ME private sector employers who want to comply with regulations and cultivate a more capable and satisfied workforce.

• Heightened consumer expectations: the overwhelming forces of globalization mean that ME consumers are evolving into the discerning market audience that demands a higher service provision across the board. Accordingly, companies cannot afford to be complacent about the quality of their essential operational processes, given that customer loyalty is now a much harder prize to win and maintain.

This goes for public sector entities as much as private ones, especially in the Middle East, where leading nations hold publicly announced aspirations for achieving innovative governance among their intelligent city objectives.

Top 3 considerations before RPA and BPM integration

RPA and BPM can deliver rapid digital transformation and automation when adequately combined and harmoniously maintained; however, they pose a difficult prospect when implemented at different times. Irrespective of where you're looking to implement both at the same time or integrating one into the other, the following considerations apply:

1. Be objective and realistic in your visions: It is necessary to outline the objective of implementation based on the size of the challenge at hand, such as ICT infrastructure, variance in regional or national office protocols and setting out realistic goals and timelines when adopting BPM/RPA.

The question that need to be answered are, "Do you have the right capabilities to achieve implementation alone, or do you need assistance from the RPA vendors? Are there operational areas that require more immediate attention over others? Are plans in place to pivot employees into new or altered roles after the RPA implementation?" For this reason, smaller-scale pilot schemes and trial processes may prove invaluable first experiences before launching into the company-wide implementation.

2. Achieve comprehensive buy-in from the outset: RPA contributes to the daily task from top-down management, and buy-in is essential for an enterprise-altering undertaking. The transformation encourages direct participation and volunteering of information that improves BPM/RPA implementation. So that for the sake of information safety, buy-in must be as transparent and open as possible when outlining the planned strategy instead of demonstrating a complex diagram.

3. Allay fears and manage expectations: BPM and RPA provide extensive business benefits, as such educate employees on the advantages of automation instead of creating insecurity and fear of replacement.

A winning combination of AI and RPA to achieve great CX

ME-based business and government organizations are in a position where, like their counterparts worldwide, unstructured improvements to individual elements of the organization’s data and process management may not be enough to deliver in a world of heightened consumer expectations. To set the standard or even keep up with the competition, it is now necessary to achieve a continuous and holistic improvement of all operational processes.

As RPA and AI adoption reach maturity, it allows organisations to enhance employee experience by doing away with repetitive tasks. It elevates employees to a higher state of delivery, flexibility, impact, and satisfaction with their role while allowing organizations to reduce operational costs and deliver a heightened customer experience.

Combining RPA with a strategic digital transformation approach makes it possible to secure short and long-term advantages. This enables organisations to remain flexible and responsive to future challenges or opportunities the post-pandemic era brings. And of course, to gain customer loyalty by transforming the customer experience.

1. Global Business Process Management Market (2021 to 2026) - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210616005836/en/Global-Business-Process-Management-Market-2021-to-2026---Growth-Trends-COVID-19-Impact-and-Forecasts-