Pipefy has published its Pipefy 2024 Automation Trends Report (registration required). The report found that most automations done with a company are conducted by customer support teams (48%), finance/procurement teams (26.7%) and IT teams (10.4%). The areas that, perhaps surprisingly, do not appear so heavily focused on creating automations were HR (6.2%), Facilities (3.1%), Legal (2.8%) and Marketing (2.67%).
The report is based on 10.8 billion discrete automations by Pipefy customers worldwide in diverse industries. The report looks at what processes each function is automating. It also revealed that customers have automated 1.1 billion emails during 2023. Estimating that it takes at least two minutes to read, analyze and respond to each email, that has saved customers 8.1 million hours of manual work. That equates to a stunning 3,894 person days saved in 2023 alone!
The report then draws an earlier report, Pipefy Survey of Business & IT Leaders on Process Automation, AI, and No-code, which was based on a survey of 160 Business and IT leaders. It highlights the drivers and benefits perceived by IT leaders. It looked into the evaluation criteria used for selecting BPA tools and then revealed the efficiency gains they are already delivering.
Alessio Alionço, CEO of Pipefy, commented, “This report illustrates the wide variety of teams that depend on automation today, as well as the range of processes and workflows that benefit from automation. It also highlights the role no-code automation can play in conserving IT resources and giving business teams more autonomy.”
What is in the report
The bulk of this report is contained within the first eight pages. The last page includes nine quotes from customers. These demonstrate the value that Pipefy has delivered. For example, Frank Wundheiler, VP of Finance at Bloomin’ Brands, commented, “With Pipefy, we found the solution to centralize and efficiently manage a high flow of important information inside the company. Pipefy fit perfectly as a key element in orchestrating several processes, bringing our operation into a new standard of excellence with great cost-effectiveness and scalability.”
The report is a data visualisations and commentary, which, in the main, repeat what the graphs show. The breakdown by function has some interesting findings, with the top automation from each function showing where the low-hanging fruit is for automation.
- Customer Support: Support Requests – 59.5%
- Finance & Procurement – AP Automation 38.4%
- IT Teams – Business Line 63.5% (Automations created for a business line, though which is not clarified)
- Human Resources: Employee Requests – 53%
- Facilities: Facility Requests – 52.6%
- Legal Teams: Contracts – 50.9%
- Marketing: Marketing requests 29.9%
The report goes into more detail for each function, but only at a high level.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There is little substance to this report. There is little analysis of the statistics, nor is there any qualitative element to the report. It is still interesting and shows where peers are automating processes. However, there is little context around the statistics. For example, are marketing requests the pain point for marketing teams or is Pipefy just delivering low-hanging fruit? Also, are the functions using automation within their systems of record?
The report also fails to provide insights by industry or country, which might have been a useful addition to the information provided. It would have made it more relevant to the reader, certainly. The final caveat is that this report’s main findings are based on statistics from Pipefy alone, not from a quantitative survey. Despite that, considering the volume of automations, it is a significant sample and does hold value.
