- The benefactors of any RPA program
are those groups who receive the value.
One way to represent this to your organization
is through the Triple-Win Model,
this model is discussed in a book written
by professors Mary Lacity and Leslie Willcocks.
Prominent authors in the research of process automation.
In this model the benefits of RPA are divided
into three separate benefactor categories,
benefits for the organization.
Benefits for employees,
and benefits for customers.
On an organizational level, many RPA initiatives
aim for baseline improvements in accuracy,
process speed and output quality as we discussed before.
But further there are often other benefits
that process transformation
and automation unlock creating shareholder value.
For example, the rules-based nature of RPA
can be leveraged to maximize compliance
or for operational agility in the face of surging demand.
Automated processes can be performed around the clock
and can be scaled against a large and flexible workforce.
All are good things to tell investors, shareholders
and executive leadership, so keep this in mind
when building your business case.
The impact of RPA also translates to benefits for employees
who might have had mundane or repetitive tasks simplified.
For example, employees who find the most time consuming
and frustrating portions of their work automated
will have more time to dedicate to high-value work
like customer interaction, higher quality work
can ultimately result in benefits like
higher employee satisfaction and lower employee attrition.
For those concerned about the impact of RPA on jobs,
take note, Lacity and Willcocks found that employees
whose jobs were affected by RPA were happy to transition
to more interesting work and learn new skills
and I've personally seen this in projects where,
by automating mundane tasks we've reduced
employee attrition rates quite simply,
people like their jobs more so they quit less.
And then there's the factor of extra time,
I like to call it the extra hour scenario
if you were to ask a team what would you do
with an extra hour in your day?
I guarantee you no one would ever say ehh,
nothing we're good.
We don't need the extra hour you can have it back.
What they actually say is goodness!
If we had an extra hour we could finally
do those proactive calls we wanted to do!
Or we could improve the quality of our data
or work on that customer experience initiative
we keep talking about!
The list goes on, and so with RPA enterprises are creating
and unleashing that extra hour.
With routine tasks out of the way
there are so many more critical
and value adding nice to haves that they can attend to.
You may be asking how big can the benefits be?
While I tend to shy away from rules of thumb
and ranges, they're often too specific
to particular companies, industries or process scopes
I can say this, it's not uncommon to see
in-year savings from RPA projects.
I've seen firms achieve anywhere from 300%
to 1,200% ROI in three years, all because,
as we've discussed the significant cost reduction
and value creation of process automation
creates both cashable and non-cashable savings
that continue to create value
long after a project is complete.
So ask yourself, if you could have say, 30% more capacity
in your team, could you be more productive?
Could you focus on growing sales?
Emphasize customer experience?
Improve regulatory compliance, or recalibrate
to work on getting better insight from the operations
and data that you're collecting?
In order to transform your business.
I'm gonna chance a guess here that the answer
is yes, yes, yes, and yes
and don't forget the customers.
One of the main goals of RPA should be to translate
the advantages of automation
and digitization to the improvement of a customer journey.
As we've discussed faster turnaround times,
improved quality, around the clock availability
and improved consistency will be a cornerstone
of your defensive strategy to compete
in an ever-digitizing world.