How do I identify and establish KPIs and measure ROI for the processes I automate

Measuring the performance of your Robotics Process Automation (RPA) deployment is a crucial part of determining its success.   Identifying and developing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) is a great mechanism to ensure that your project is on track and continues to deliver a successful outcome.

Success can be very context specific.  In other words, success can have very different meanings for different RPA stakeholders.

Essentially. there are two categories of RPA KPI’s

• Operational insights refer to RPA execution, but there is  no reference to financial or time savings
• Business insights bridge the gap between the operational level to the business level and demonstrate how RPA has benefitted the company (e.g., the total number of invoices processed by the RPA bots) 

Implementation Costs

There is an important metric that has an impact on the ROI of your automation project.  Generally, the budget required for an RPA implementation is lower than that for other IT projects.  Also, the time to complete is a relatively short (three months for a bot) compared with several years for other IT projects.  Hence reliance on implementation costs can show the financial benefits of RPA

Cycle Time

Because of their capacity to accomplish routine tasks faster (and error-free), software robots lead to cycle time reductions.  Moreover, bots do not get tired take a vacation, or get sick, which allows them to work steadily and consistently.

Throughput

This is a measure of the output of your company at a particular time.   Given the reduction in cycle time, RPA deployment typically boosts this KPI,  another example of successful deployment.   However, increased throughput deployed using RPA could also have a potential bottleneck in other parts of the workflow process.

Accuracy

Increased accuracy is among the top benefits of automation.  Assuming that the software is correctly operating, processes can be performed with zero error rate.

Compliance

• Due to its increased accuracy, RPA leads to fewer compliance issues.  The bots facilitate data protection.  They also make it easier to streamline adherence to new regulations, given the high regulatory change frequency.  This benefit should not be disregarded.
• Compliance standards are more easily reinforced when RPA facilitates the set-up of checks and balances.  There are two related ways to quantify this indicator:  (1)These indicators can indicate the number of compliance errors (if any) and (2) the cost of fixing them. 

Qualitative Indicators

• These are RPA KPIs that cannot be directly measured and easily quantifiable.  A few examples are flexibility, scalability, or human related measures such as customer satisfaction and employee morale.
• Employee Morale is an example of a qualitative measure of employee engagement in the short term.  To evaluate it, you should have the employees from the departments most affected by automation fill in surveys about how they feel concerning the workload or their role in the organization before and after automation. 

Process Outcomes

The metric is also computed the traditional way by comparing process outcomes before and after RPA deployment.  The result tells you what software robots have been able to bring to your company, and, consequently, to what extent they support the attainment of your business objectives.

Conclusion

RPA performance metrics are essential in making a  convincing case for automating business processes.  It offers a transparent and quantitative demonstration of its operational as well as financial impact on the business.

Measuring the performance of your (RPA) deployment is a crucial part of determining its success.   Identifying and developing (KPI’s) is a great mechanism to ensure that your project is on track and continues to deliver a successful solution.