Robotic process automation (RPA) can open a lot of avenues for business benefits through manual work reductions, scaling, IT savings, customer / employee satisfaction and much more. The question is how do you recognize the processes that would be beneficial to automate?

First, we’ll go through what an RPA business case consists of, and then in the end we’ve included our calculator to test your own process with.

Process characteristics, complexity, and stability

First let’s consider the process characteristics. Is all the data currently in a digital form? If not, then is it possible to translate these into digital form? For instance, if your current process has physical documents, is it possible to translate these into PDF format so that we would be able to read these using an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool? We should also consider if all the process steps have unambiguous logical rules. If not, then is it possible to change these rules to be more suitable for robotics?

Secondly, we should consider the process complexity. This is important since it’s closely tied to the cost of automation. Some key aspects here are the number of logical decisions in the process, how complicated they are, and the number of different applications used in the process. One good indicator here is to think how long it takes for a new employee to learn the process. Generally, if it takes about 1 to 2 days, the process is quite simple, 1 week is medium, and 2 weeks or more is of high complexity. The higher the complexity, the higher the costs of development, so when the complexity increases, the potential benefits should increase as well.

Application stability should also be considered. If the process uses applications that are still being actively developed, and it is expected that they are updated frequently, then it can increase the maintenance cost of the robotic solution. On the other hand, if the application is well established and feature ready, it needs less updates and thus decreases the needed maintenance for the robotic process.

Benefits of automating your process

The final factor, which ultimately decides if the process is a good candidate for robotics or not, is the potential benefits posed by the automation. Manual work savings (or FTE – Full-Time Equivalent) are used most commonly as a benchmark for the validity of an RPA business case, however there are a lot of other benefits that should be considered as well.

1. Employee / customer satisfaction
   • Robotics can remove mundane jobs from employees, who can then focus on more productive and meaningful tasks.
   • In certain cases, robots can provide superior customer service by sending automated notifications and other relevant data to the customer, having faster response time, and combining processes to provide a smoother customer experience.
     
     
2. Decreased errors / data integrity
   • Robots don´t make mistakes, which decreases errors in the process and improves data validity and integrity.
     
     
3. Efficiency improvements and scaling up business processes
   • Robots don´t need coffee breaks, naps or full nights sleep for that matter, so you can run your business processes 24/7 if needed.
   • You´ll have a digital employee who is always available to scale up your processes and performance.
     
     
4. Increased sales
   • In some scenarios implementing robotics to a business process can have positive impact on new sales by making the purchase process smoother by increasing speed, reducing manual work from ordering, connecting systems / processes to automate the full end-to-end process.
     
     
5. IT cost savings
   • No need to build API connections between applications / systems
   • Increased lifecycle of older legacy systems
     
     
6. Increased speed
   • Robots work faster than humans, which can increase the speed of business processes.

Calculating the business case

The following calculator is taking all these aspects into account and by the end of it, you should have a high-level business case estimation whether the process is a good candidate for robotics or not. The aim of this calculator is not to give you the final business case calculation, but to give a rough estimation of it. A more detailed review can be done together with our experts.

About the writer:

Ville Heinilä

Delivery Lead

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ville-heinilä-598695b8/