Process automation in numbers by Camunda

Camunda has recently published a great report on the state of process automation 2022. It is based on a survey of 400 IT decision makers in the US and Europe. I encourage everybody, who is interested in automation to get familiar with it. Most of the key results follow the general feeling or common sense, but there are some surprises.

The first statement of the report is its essence and I value it the most “Process automation is digital transformation imperative”. I can’t agree more on that. This has been confirmed by 97% of decision makers, who agreed with following: “Process automation is vital to digital transformation”. One could assume, that the remaining 3% is the statistical error.

Drivers for process automation

The first surprise concerns the business drivers for automation initiatives. Only half (49%) of them are focused on driving business growth.

Source: Camunda report “State Of Process Automation”

I believe, that the growth driver will increase significantly in the nearest future. Constant pressure from customer centricity approach like multi-channel, omni-channel or channel-agnostic customer behaviour, forces organizations to standardize and automate customer oriented processes.

Recent COVID-19 challenge proved, that many organization had to take immediate and short-sighted decision to adapt to new situation. Now it’s time to make long term plans and continue the transformation in the right direction. It’s not only about existing process automation, but opening new sales or service channels for your customers. As customer I mean here both end consumers as well as your partners.

In this context, the report says that 88% of IT initiatives have been started or accelerated due to COVID-19. I wonder how many of them are short term solutions, requiring the adaptations to the long term plans.

Components used in typical process automation

Another surprise is, that the component most frequently used in a typical process automation is Connected devices (IoT) – 51%.

Source: Camunda report “State Of Process Automation”

To be honest I am very curious what devices were in mind of the respondents and in which processes they were used. I hope to get some more insight from Camunda team someday.
Looking at the rest of components it is no wonder, that the “Packaged enterprise application” and “Website or customer portals” / “Mobile applications” are in the top. In my opinion these are the most advantageous use cases, where companies execute their digital transformation strategies with agile approach. It’s core assumption is to effectively deliver modern solutions to the customer without big bang projects (replacing your core applications / legacy systems).

Typical use cases

There is no surprise here, but I can’t stop myself from sharing this outcome.

Source: Camunda report “State Of Process Automation”.

End-to-end visibility and automation of processes across different system and technologies is the top typical use case. Looking at my personal experience this is indeed the most frequent case. Medium and large size companies, have many multistep processes, covering different business areas and consequently systems. One of the most effective way to transform to digital is to reuse existing system where reasonable/possible and build new, light and flexible solution on top of it.

Check out our Camunda services and custom extensions. And if you want to learn more take a look on our article about Agile Digital Transformation with Camunda.

Piotr Mazur
Digital Transformation Solution Manager