Performance Metrics for Assessing RPA Success

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With the advent of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), companies have successfully eliminated manual errors and redundancy in business operations, thereby saving thousands of hours and money in millions. However, this can impact them positively in the real sense only if these benefits can be applied to their products and services, which eventually means more value for their end customer.

The question is – how to measure these benefits. It is then upon the organization to understand and make its stakeholders understand how it has deployed RPA and how it has been used to improve productivity. The role of performance metrics comes into play here because it is essential to demonstrate the benefits of RPA.

The first step to measure RPA is to have a particular goal in mind. Once the goal is set, then the alignment of metrics with the objectives can be used to measure the progress, especially towards their fulfillment.

If the company wants to saturate the benefits of RPA, then it has to measure every metric at a regular interval and total it for the year as that will give a complete understanding of the scale and the speed at which the goal is being achieved.

Another benefit of having a goal-oriented approach to develop performance metrics is that it will be easy to ascertain where the RPA has maximum impact and based on this data, future projections can be made which will help the company to keep a hold on its Return on Investment (ROI).

In this article, we will take you through some performance metrics, which help in scaling RPA in your organization.

Use of robots

Robots are highly efficient and are built to do strenuous or mundane or repetitive tasks without any error. These intelligent machines do not require any rest, compared to their counterparts.

Robots go off the track only when the technology they are built on becomes obsolete but otherwise, their productivity, efficiency, and goal achievement are something that cannot be challenged. Companies can do a comparative analysis of how much turnaround time is being taken by manual work as compared to automation tools or robots and evaluate which process works best for them.

Increase in retention rates

Imagine if you are in an industry where employee retention is the biggest challenge, and getting new people to work for you is expensive. Such sectors have to bear the burden of employing people again, orient and train them, and yet face the risk of losing them after all the efforts.

RPA helps in improving employee retention by making it easier to do redundant and repetitive work seamlessly. So, employees can handle critical business-related tasks that can give them satisfaction from their jobs, which will, in turn, lead to increased retention rates.

Better accuracy in the processes

Manual work results in human errors, often it is caused by mundane or repetitive work, and the organizations have to deal with the damages borne out of these errors. Hence, companies need to ensure that appropriate checks and balances are in place that could help them deal with the situation.

This is where RPA comes to the rescue.

To determine the value delivered by RPA, you can run a comparative analysis where you measure costs and the amount of work needed to rectify the human error and the cost of RPA implementation.

This way, you will get a clear idea of the benefits and accuracy of RPA over manual work. One thing to be kept in mind is that these robots help in correcting faulty processes. The more efficient the implementation of RPA is, the better it is for the company to eliminate routine errors.

Increase in employee satisfaction

Understand and analyze which departments require the implementation of RPA. Then, with different survey patterns, measure employee satisfaction with their role and duties before and after RPA. If you are automating the processes that were time-consuming for the employees, they will be more productive.

Reduction in data entry errors

One can reach a saturation point wherein errors become a part of the process. The data entry becomes faulty, and due to this, compliance issues crop up. With RPA, you can create a system of checks that will eliminate data entry issues thereby reducing compliance issues.

Audit becomes easier

Earlier people used to fear the mention of an audit because that would mean digging old records and verification of details. But with the implementation of RPA, you can automate important portions of such audit process because the system becomes centralized and all the data silos get connected with various systems.

RPA implies your audit becomes digitalized, which means that finding information during the audit is easier and also helps companies to automate their routine tasks, like reconciliation. When such routine tasks are audited by an automated system, the auditors and accountants can focus on important data and reduce anomalies.

A Focus on more crucial tasks

When all the manual tasks are done by RPA induced platform, the employees who are engaged in manual work get rid of them and can focus on business acquisition and improving profitability.

You can measure the effectiveness of RPA by understanding the rate of crucial task completion when the routine tasks were done by the employees and after they were taken over by RPA platforms.

Speed of the processes

You can easily measure how much time a process takes to complete before implementing RPA and after implementing RPA. With robots are in place, the processes can get over quickly as compared to when humans did it.

Decrease in labor cost

Companies can save huge costs when it comes to salaries, bonuses, regular pieces of training, and even incentives.
Robots only need technology upgrades and patchwork as compared to their human counterparts. The hiring, training, and salary costs can be measured before and after RPA implementation and companies will eventually find out that it is a win-win situation for them.

Such processes can be extremely helpful especially for a business that faces a huge difference in demand and supply of competent resources. Companies can do away with overpaying the employees for overtime or find new people to fill in to do the extra work who might not even stay with them after training them.

When intense and demanding periods of high demand and production come up, companies can automate manual labor and save by not overpaying or indulging in recruiting and training someone else for the job.

You can see the efficiency of RPA by comparing the pre-RPA implementation phase when high-demand seasons were backed by overworked employees with the scenario when RPA was activated.

Conclusion

With the implementation of RPA metrics, your goals can be re-evaluated and your achievement of goals, keeping in mind these metrics, can be measured. You can draw a correlation between processes automation and what the benefits are.

Companies find it extremely hard to satisfy their employees because many employees are stuck doing jobs which they don’t like. In many companies, such talents feel underemployed, and when these superfluous and outmoded tasks are taken care of by automation, employees feel that they are worth it because they are oriented towards greater responsibilities, which might have a great impact on the bottom line of the company.

RPA performance metrics provide and contribute to the overall ROI calculation. The post RPA implemented ROI, in comparison with the old ROI, can be a great indicator of the benefits of RPA.

Whenever the company is adding new technology, it can upgrade automatically with RPA in place. Whenever you introduce a new tool, you do not have to undergo the tiring process of evaluating your business model again. Also, there is no need to rebuild your entire automation process again, no matter the degree of transition taking place in your organization.

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