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