BD can benefit from $10.7b global robotic mkt by 2027

During a situation like pandemic when employees cannot be in the same office together, robotic process automation (RPA) enables organisations run core business activities through automated workflows that require fewer people in the loop.

Besides, increasing adoption of automation software and services enable organisations to meet consumer expectations and offer enhanced customer management. 

In this backdrop, besides adopting the proven solution for enterprises to accelerate business growth, Bangladesh has enormous potentials to grab the global robotic process automation market which is expected to reach USD 10.7 billion by 2027 expanding annually at 33.6 percent by overcoming the challenges and inefficiencies associated with legacy business systems. 

In a growing market like Bangladesh which is fastest growing in SAARC region at this moment - it's very critical for the enterprises to embrace  "Intelligent Automation"  to  enable business growth at exponential rate beating certain uncertainties like COVID and its impact on economy. 

Experts made these observations at an international webinar and members’ conference on ‘Transforming Finance & Accounting with Robotic Process Automation’ organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh (ICAB) on Thursday. 

Zunaid Ahmed Palak, MP, State Minister, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Division, was present at the conference as the chief guest.  

Anshuman Rai, Vice President, India and South Asia Business, Uipath, Christiaan Esmeijer, Vice President-EPS Global Services, UiPath and Arunprasad Ram, Finance & Accounting-Industry practice leader, UiPath were keynote speakers.

Zunaid Ahmed Palak said, the world is becoming data and technology-driven increasingly. With the rapid pace at which technology is developing, finance and accounting professionals will have to find ways to capitalise the opportunities present, or risk being left behind with digital innovations, he said adding this will ensure business operations and process compliance with regulations and standards. 

He also said, Robotic Process Automation is employing smart software robots (bots) that identify, and copycat human interactions with core legacy systems, along with web and other desktop applications to execute processes. 

Mahmudul Hasan Khusru said, Hyper automation, RPA, Process Mining, OCR gives a golden chance to the new generation of Bangladesh since these new edge technologies have exponential growth prospects. Hence it will be critical for top Universities, Engineering  Bangladesh  to imbibe Automation related courses in their curriculum since moving forward its essential to make the Students ready for Next gen Technology  as Automation  will be an essential part of lives of working executives like the way Mobile phones , Microsoft office, laptops , desktops etc.

As panelists Janardhan Hebbar, Vice President, Finance, Dentsu Aegis Network, Sazzad Chowdhury, Director and CFO, Berger Paints Bangladesh and Faisal Mohammad, Head of Automation, Robo2Mation spoke at the conference.

Mahmudul Hasan Khusru, President-ICAB delivered welcome address while Dewan Nurul Islam, past president, ICAB and Managing Director, Grant Thornton Consulting Bangladesh Ltd presided over the conference as the session chairman.

They also opined that, the role of technology and its integration within the organisations is evolving at a faster pace. The ever-increasing regulatory changes and the compliance functions are reducing the speed of work done by employees. This has resulted in the adoption of robotics process automation to manage the compliance functions in a better manner than employees.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the technology that allows anyone today to configure computer software, or a “robot” to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within digital systems to execute a business process. RPA bots utilize the user interface to capture data and manipulate applications just like humans do. They interpret, trigger responses and communicate with other systems in order to perform on a vast variety of repetitive tasks. Only substantially better: an RPA software robot never sleeps and makes zero mistakes.

RPA robots are capable of mimicking many–if not all–human user actions which are rule-based. They log into applications, move files and folders, copy and paste data, fill in forms, extract structured and semi-structured data from documents, scrape browsers, and more.

Exports, GDP, banking penetration, electronic payments have grown in multifold in last 2 decades and we have reached a stage where it's essential to embrace technologies like automation, RPA , Process Mining to create the platform for sustaining hyper growth of business. Some of the largest enterprises from Bangladesh like Dhaka Bank, Expo Group, Berger Paints, Mutual Trust Bank, SQ Group have already started using “RPA/Intelligent Automation’ as part of their digital transformation.

The world has moved beyond RPA (Robotic process Automation) to intelligent hyper automation whose 3 key pillars are; RPA, OCR (optical character recognition) and Process Mining (with Data science )