COVID-19: How Is It Affecting The IT-BPM Industry?

Venkatesh Ramarathinam, CEO, Vuram, says that the BPM and RPA market has grown exponentially over the last decade. From being a nice to have, organizations are increasingly looking at BPM and RPA as must haves to propel their growth. The products in this space have also matured leaps and bounds, offering a composite automation framework.

With the increasing demand for AI & ML enablement in the market, it is now imperative that organizations have good data habits and processes in place, which are fundamental to do anything with AI and gain meaningful insights, patterns, and predictions on organization and customer behavior. This trend can be expected to continue with its growth seeing that today there are more products that are being offered as companies are looking for more and more ways to streamline their process, increase speed and cut costs, altogether. This increases the overall adoption and market for the BPM and RPA tools.

During the current scenario, there has been a huge impact on the overall economy, as the Indian IT sector caters to a wide sector of industries, thus there might be a reduction in the overall demand from the global market, owing to the current pandemic COVID-19. What are some of the challenges we are looking at here?

Business Process Management (BPM) is widely seen as one of the key priorities for organizations to survive the highly competitive environment and markets, irrespective of the sector or segment. When adopting BPM or RPA, organizations must have an understanding and appreciation of the key business drivers and the expected outcome. Purely focusing on automation or digitization through use of technology, without focusing on the value drivers, could result in broken processes and convoluted logic in the underlying business process. Technology is just one aspect of BPM. Some organizations look at BPM purely from a technology aspect and that results in poor outcomes”, continues Ramarathinam.

Alok Bansal, MD and Country Head, Visionet India says that the key growth driving factors in BPM and RPA segments are “digitization, service innovationand market transformation – are reforming the BPM industry and have been significantly contributing to their growth.”

Digitization & Automation: Most global  companies will have digital transformation as their corporate strategy in the  next couple of years. It will require wide implementation of disruptive technologies, organizations will look to work with efficient outsourcing partners that have innovative digital capabilityAsdigital transformation is enabled by automation, RPA combines business process management software and cognitive processing to replace human labor. Despite high technology costs, many BPM providers are embracing  RPA to lower costs in the long run. Automation in outsourcing is changing the economics and attractiveness of the global outsourcing market.

·         Global Market Changes: Transformation in the global market are changing the outsourcing business.Businesses now engage companies that offer outsourcing services in the cloud or prefer to manage these services in-house.Majority of outsourcing clients are looking for much more in terms of services than contemporary offerings. BPM clients are not reluctant to increasing spend for better service relationship; what they want is high-quality, reliable service.BPM services have moved beyond the traditional model of cost savings toward services that have a profound impact on a company’s business. The future growth of the customer care BPM market will be fueled by higher-value services that address business outcomes through consulting, planning, and analysis.

In this case, while there is a setback in the industry what can be some innovations like, “India happens to be the hotbed for innovation. The days of traditional BPM processes and tools are finally past us! The onset of rapidly evolving new technology has led us towards “Intelligent Business Process Management’. It involves weaving cutting-edge technology such as RPA, AI, analytics, etc. into workflows to further enhance the outcomes, automate processes and improve efficiency. Let’s consider a simple instance of breaking down the data derived from a BPM platform: where a traditional BPM system eats into time and resources, an ‘intelligent’ system will incorporate analytics to convert data automatically into tangible insights in no time,” added Bansal.

As the industry as a whole, what can a futuristic approach to the BPM and RPA segment, Ramarathinam adds his concluding words, “Due to its potential to significantly increase productivity and cut down costs, business process management (BPM) has received considerable attention, globally. The market is going to be flooded with a slew of products offering a wide variety of functionality – from products that provide simple workflow capabilities to providing composite automation frameworks. Organizations of various sizes will have products that fit their portfolio and business priorities. The growth trend of the BPM segment is clearly upward.”