Back
The intelligent automation market in the life sciences industry is expected to show ~50% annual growth to reach USD 470 Mn by 2023.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to the use of software bots for the automation of business processes. RPA has found several use cases in industrial processes that can help lean out operations in the form of lowered cost, significant efficiency gains, and higher quality output.
Even though life sciences companies are facing several roadblocks in implementing RPA like unavailability of test data and lack of adequate infrastructure, they are still automating processes to foster productivity, accuracy, scalability, and cost savings.
Life sciences companies are highly leveraging intelligent automation solutions for their core processes like drug discovery and product development in addition to operational and administrative processes.
Roadblocks in RPA for Life Sciences
Even though the industrial applications of RPA seem just next door, but there are a lot of challenges enterprises have to tackle in order to harness its powers. Various challenges such as unavailability of test data, incompatible IT infrastructure, and organizational changes arise while implementing RPA in life sciences organizations.
Some of the major challenges to tackle include:
- Unstructured Processes – Businesses with processes that are non-standardized and require frequent human intervention for execution struggle to implement RPA.
- Test Data Unavailability – A large amount of data is required to train bots on high importance minute interlinked details. The unavailability of this data is another roadblock for RPA implementation in life sciences.
- Process Validation – Missing out validating operating environment requirements such as business Service Level Agreements (SLAs), process execution window, and dependent activities.
- IT Infrastructure – Compatibility issues between existing IT infrastructure and RPA solutions such as interconnected systems and lack of homogeneous programming platform.
- Change Management – It is difficult if multiple applications are used in the process and any change in the front-end UI even though not impacting the processing procedures, will impact the RPA script and the outcome.
Drivers of RPA success in Life Sciences
Even after the implementation challenges, life sciences companies are automating processes through RPA owing to the benefits such as higher productivity, cost savings, and lower manual errors.
RPA implementation in Life Sciences is enabling companies with:
- Increased Productivity: Reduces employee time needed for repetitive business processes, thereby freeing up employees to focus on more value-added tasks to improve business metrics.
- Cost Savings: The average cost of implementing and running a robot is much less than the full-time equivalent costs and decreases with large-scale deployments.
- Scalability & Flexibility: Robots can easily be scaled up and down to handle demand fluctuations and seasonal variations.
- Integration: The integration of RPA with machine learning can help in advancing the capabilities of software bots beyond rule-based processes and allowing task execution like human decision-making skills.
- Analytics: RPA can be leveraged to create and maintain well-structured and correctly classified data across enterprise systems and generate data lakes for developing advanced ML models.
Even after the implementation challenges, life sciences companies are automating processes through RPA owing to the benefits such as higher productivity, cost savings, and lower manual errors.
RPA Deployment in Life Sciences
Draup has extensively covered the deployment of RPA solutions across a variety of business intentions and use cases as illustrated in the figure below.
From drug development and trial, device and systems, and manufacturing to invoice processing automation, automated inventory management, and platform integration, RPA gained popularity in this industry.
For deeper insights into the processes, solutions, and RPA implementation workflows, download the full report.
ROI Analysis
Most enterprises hesitate to deploy emerging technologies owing to the financial and operational risks these technologies can pose on general business. However, in the case of RPA, there is a proven record of exceptional return on investment for global enterprises.
Let us analyze the ROI of RPA across different business intentions.
Sales and Marketing:
- Increase in sales demand forecast accuracy to ~78% using real-time monitoring of sales data.
- Increased click through rate by 35-40%
- ~85% decrease in email sending time and increase in revenue generated per email.
Supply Chain:
- ~85% reduction in stock-out occurrence.
- ~30% decrease in shipment cost post digitization.
- Reduction in time spent on filing shipment request, saving 25-30% of executive’s time.
Human Resources:
- ~75% reduction in employee onboarding time.
- Reduction of time taken to create offer letter from ~2 hours to ~2 minutes.
Device and Systems:
- ~50% time reduction in medicine dispensing.
- ~95% of the countable prescriptions are processed automatically.
IT and Administration:
- ~ 90% decrease in document processing time
- 75% reduction in document processing error
Even though RPA might seem a relatively new technology, the impact it has had on the industry can be witnessed from the statistics we discussed.
Opportunity Propensity
Since this is a growing market, especially in Life Sciences, the opportunities for service providers are endless. The figure below indicates the major focus areas for RPA solution providers in this industry.
The variety of needs of enterprises opens up the market to RPA service providers globally. Service providers operating in any of the areas can enter the RPA trend and serve enterprises with varied needs.
Our sales intelligence platform provides targeted insights to players and service providers active in the healthcare industry. Service providers can gather product/service requirements and other strategic insights to generate proposals and fulfill business intentions based on specific needs of their prospects.
