A quarter of UK businesses are still in the early stages of automation

23 per cent of firms say that they use little to no automation, but that is set to change soon

Automation is swiftly becoming the hot topic of the IT industry, able to deliver huge benefits for businesses keen to become more flexible and proactive as they reshape themselves to deliver on the ever-increasing expectations of speed and personalisation in the delivery of goods and services. Smarter, integrated workflows can deliver significant efficiencies as they replace slow, error-prone manual processes.

Business process automation (BPA) is an important component in the adjustment of organisations to the demands of the digital economy. If it is well executed, it has the potential to improve outcomes for employers, employees and customers. However, many firms are still in the very early stages of adoption

According to research presented in a new whitepaper from Computing and Liaison Technologies, nine in 10 UK companies (91 per cent) have adopted automation in some way, but only five per cent describe their usage as ‘Very high' - indicating the automation of almost every process.

One in five survey respondents (19 per cent) said that they were well on the way to completing automation. However, the vast majority (54 per cent) indicated that their level of adoption was only ‘Moderate', with only essential business processes and nothing else automated at this time.

The remaining respondents (23 per cent) described their adoption of BPA as either ‘Low', signalling that they have only just begun their automation journey, ‘Very Low', indicating that they are yet to start, or ‘Don't know', which in this context can be taken to mean that automation has not yet begun.

However, the proportion of firms who are in the extremely early stages of adoption is set to change. When asked about their future intent in regards to BPA, only 10 per cent had no plans, while the remainder expected to begin or increase their use of automation:

• A third (32 per cent) of respondents said that they were still to begin ‘significant' automation, but had plans to do so;
• Almost half (49 per cent) had one or more small projects ongoing to automate a whole or part of a process; and
• 39 per cent had at least one major BPA project already underway.

BPA enables firms to raise efficiency and improve staff morale, replacing time-consuming manual processes with more skilled work. The research presented in the whitepaper indicates that a majority of UK-based firms have embraced this fact and are moving towards automation, although many are approaching the subject - which can be a controversial one - with caution.