The global Robotic Process Automation market is expected to reach over USD 2.8 billion by 2023, according to a report published by Energias Market Research, translating to a compound annual growth rate of 33.3% (from 2017 to 2023).

With inexpensive implementation costs and typically high returns on investment, a key factor driving this impressive growth rate will be the increased adoption of RPA across businesses of all sizes - small, medium and large alike.

In Australia, small and medium businesses account for a staggering 93% of the domestic company landscape, according to this Government report. The figures are similar in New Zealand, Singapore and elsewhere around the globe.

To date, RPA adoption in the Asia Pacific region has been led predominantly by larger enterprises. CiGen Executive Director Leigh Pullen comments that in the past 6 months, small and medium businesses are increasingly becoming aware of the power of RPA and are seeking to adopt.

Let us see now what this positive forecast means for the specific case of small and medium sized businesses.

Why do small and medium businesses need robotic process automation?

Small and medium businesses are anticipated to adopt and reap the benefits of robotic process automation in the following years. But why would businesses of this size need RPA in the first place? In order to answer, we can start by looking at the challenges that these companies face.

According to UiPath, smaller enterprises must manage a myriad of issues, including:

Uncertainty

Reducing operational costs

Increasing revenue growth and profitability

Attracting and retaining new customers

Improving workforce productivity

Improving quality of products and processes

However, many business leaders continue to believe that their operations are either not suitable or of sufficient scale for an RPA investment. After all, automation is a tool best suited for larger scale and global enterprises, isn’t it?

But as Leigh Pullen argues in an interview for the Australian Financial Review, there should be no such delineation between company size and the ability to adopt RPA, considering the favourable cost-benefit outcome of an robotic process automation implementation.

Through its RPA Robots for Hire service, which is specifically tailored for small and medium businesses, CiGen has often observed a proportionally greater cost-benefit improvement, relative to some larger enterprises.