Читать книгу The Digital Transformation of Logistics - Группа авторов - Страница 86

As with many of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies mentioned in this book, RPA has become a trending topic in the world of supply chain and logistics, and there are many speculations about wide adoption in the following years. The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply predicted that by 2019, there would be 72% of all companies using RPA to reduce costs and transaction times and increase levels of productivity and compliance (Deckard 2018). However, just as with other discussed technologies both present and past like Blockchain and RFID, companies are finding it much more difficult to implement it than originally expected. Gartner reports that RPA tools sit at the “peak of inflated expectations” in its hype cycle (Kerremans 2018). Fersht and Snowdan (2017) report that the RPA software market and RPA services expanded by 42% from 2017 to 2018 and are predicted to grow by 94% by 2021. Growth in RPA is not necessarily a question of when but more a question of how fast we will see it come to fruition.

The hype surrounding RPA has been around for the past five years though, and it warrants looking at past predictions to see where we are now. Transparency Market Research (2015) claimed that the IT RPA market would reach $4.98 billion by 2020. Kenneth Research (2019) reported that by 2026, the RPA market would be $8.8 billion. However, Grand View Research (2018) shows that in 2018, the total RPA market size was around $600 million well short of the progress that had been anticipated. Although until this point RPA has been looking more like hype than reality, we believe that this technology is worth further investigation.