The IT revolution in India started with a need met by offshoring. The expensive human resources were replaced with cheaper human beings in another country.

With advent of new technology, the low end offshoring is finding their cake being eaten by an invisible opponent. This is visible in the lower revenues being forecasted by major Indian SIs. Somehow, the amount of outsourcing that the firms were doing earlier is not continuing. Intelligent Process Automation may be to be blamed.

Process Automation is one of the main trends today that refers to replacing tedious repetitive work being done by humans with software robots. The approach of process automation with software robots offers high value creation opportunity with:

1. Significant cost savings (estimated to be 35-65 per cent for onshore process operations and 10-30 per cent in offshore delivery)
2. Better service delivery & manageability
3. Quicker time-to-value

All this can be achieved at relatively lower risk brought about by non-invasive nature of automation and easier tracking.

While this new process is useful for almost all organisations, the regulated industries with high-volume, transactional business processes offer the most potential with an investment recovery period as short as 6-9 months. Healthcare business accounted for over 11% market share in 2015 for process automation.

Today, the process automation is augmented with machine learning. This augmentation makes it an “Intelligent Process Automation” (IPA).

At the very basic level, IPA can be thought to be constituted of the following:

Progress is uniquely positioned to address this opportunity as it has most of the underlying tools to make IPA work. Translated to Progress tools this means:

If you would like us to help you with introducing intelligent process automation in your organisation, please drop a line to: abhishek.kant@progress.com