Your automation is probably SAVING MORE than you think!

Great work launching those robots, it takes a lot of hard work and coordination to make this happen. Now, don't sell yourself short.

We optimize business processes with technology to make an improvement that is significant enough to outweigh the cost and the efforts to implement the solution. Mostly automation teams focus on time saved, however, are you also accounting for the other KPIs that you have improved?

You may want to improve customer service or customer experience by shorting queuing times, or by providing faster, more accurate service. Your objective might be to improve staff morale, provide a better user experience on legacy applications or allow for a better work-life balance.

These improvements are ‘intangible savings’ and are a lot more difficult to calculate than cost/time savings and so they are often forgotten or ignored. However, they still will have indirect financial benefits to the bottom line.

Measuring time savings

Time savings is by far the easiest way to measure improved efficiency, if teams are spending less time on a task then they are more efficient. By reducing or removing non-value add tasks, staff can spend more time on value-adding tasks the idea, removing activities like copy-and-pasting, filling in forms, and sorting out emails. More time is focused on the creative interesting human to human interaction activities.

If you’ve saved staff time on a specific task, then you can easily calculate the cost savings:

Cost of human effort needed to complete task

PLUS cost saved from hiring additional staff

PLUS risk of new staff not having the right skillset and experience

MINUS cost to develop and deliver to the automated solution (and running costs)

= NET SAVINGS OF AUTOMATION

When calculating the actual cost of doing a task, it’s best to use a monthly average for volume of work:

Cost to complete task = Average monthly volume x average handling time

A yearly average that’s a lot of data and would take a lot of time to gather, and a daily average could easily give skewed results. For example, the finance team may have processes that are done monthly or yearly, whereas the customer service team may have processes that are done a hundred times a day. The monthly average is an easier metric to measure and to compare different processes from different departments against each other.

When it comes to automation you may not be able to automate the entire process, so the actual time saved would be a percentage of the time taking for this process, as the process will still need a person to complete it.

Here are some process improvements that may provide financial benefits indirectly:

Save on Third party costs

A good source of automation opportunities are outsourced processes. These can be either completely or partially outsourced can the cost saved would be on the third-party fees.

This doesn’t mean you need to break partnership with your business process outsourcing (BPO), but automating/partially automating outsourced processes can mean you can get a lot more for your BPO money. In fact digital BPO or iBPO (for intelligent BPO) in the new trend where BPO companies are offering this as a service, which makes their business more efficient, and their service offering remains attractive in the modern world.

Save on reducing errors

A huge cost savings which is less obvious but pays back double, is reducing errors. Say a process has 50 human errors every year and every time you get an error it costs you $1,000. that's $50,000 of potential savings by totally eradicate those errors.

Bear in mind that the time taken for staff to fix or reverse each error also has a cost to it. Maybe that takes 30 minutes just to reverse one error, so removing human error from the process saves an additional 25 hours a year.

Save on reducing fine

Cost avoidance from not paying fees or fines is another big saving. In fact some automation projects on paper may not look profitable such as to make a process more compliant. However, the avoidance of large fines from being compliant could make this a very worthwhile project financially speaking.

Customer experience (CX)

By making customer-facing processes faster and more accurate this can definitely improve the customers impression of your service, as customers don’t need to call back to fix something, they don’t feel frustrated by long hold times or slow-working staff. The benefits are difficult to measure, but an improvement to CX can reduce the loss of customers, as it costs more to acquire new customers.

-----------

Thanks for reading,?if this resonated with you I'd love for you to hit that like button and share this newsletter for your colleagues to subscribe, so that they too can get notified of my weekly articles.

I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on any of the points that spoke to you, please feel free to leave your comments below and I and other readers would love to hear about your insights and experiences.

If you're like us then you've probably had enough of the common challenges and stresses of RPA and AI projects. Our tool, AutoLyst, streamlines the running of projects and boosts efficiency, to deliver faster, and discover more opportunities. Book a demo at?https://calendly.com/tony_leania?or, as you're a newsletter subscriber, you can?try it for free?[use code:?linkedin_news]

We're dedicated to helping analysts, project/program managers, and consultants like us succeed in this space. Reach out if you have questions.

---------

????? [FREE EBOOK] SIGNUP TO THE NEWSLETTER TO GET A COPY?????

BECOME AN AUTOMATION SUPERHERO

#1 strategy for accelerating your career in the world of Process Automation and Intelligent Automation to become an expert your team and business can turn to for guidance

You can also learn more from my book,?Business @ the Speed of Bots: The AEIO YOU method HOW TO IMPLEMENT ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION THAT SCALES. Get ready for the new digital transformation age for more information.?The foreword is written by Guy Kirkwood, who is the Chief Evangelist at UiPath, and a very well-known advocate of RPA with over 20 years of experience in outsourcing.