Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a revolutionary technology that aims to help businesses in various ways by simplifying their business operations. RPA services enable large-scale digital transformation and pave the way towards greater organizational prosperity. If you take a deeper look at robotic process automation benefits, you will understand the importance of this fascinating technology, as it offers:
- Increased accuracy
- Enhanced efficiency
- Increased productivity & sales outcomes
- Better business process visibility
- Greater transparency
- Better data access control & security
But how would you verify whether you are reaping the benefits of intelligent automation or not? RPA analytics is the key.
The RPA system always wants to tell a story and it is important to listen so that an enterprise can harness the true potential of automation. Understanding existing processes and optimizing shortcomings can only lead to elevated ROI. But at first, you need to start looking at RPA through a data-driven lens.
Need of RPA Analytics
1. Evaluate the Performance of RPA Bots
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology is implemented to meet certain key business objectives. During the process discovery stage and subsequently, during the documentation stage, all expectations from RPA software are listed properly. RPA analytics helps you access the performance of all listed automated business processes in real-time and let you know whether they are meeting stated business objectives or not. RPA analytics make you aware of various things, like:
- Which RPA bots are performing well?
- Which bots have failed?
- What are the stages where a certain business process breaks down?
- How much service level agreement is fulfilled?
And so on…
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software created using leading-edge RPA tools like UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, etc., provides you with an easy-to-understand dashboard where you can watch all actionable data related to RPA bots and gauge their performance.
2. Maximize ROI
One big motivation that encourages businesses to implement robotic process automation (RPA) software is to improve ROI. With advanced RPA analytics tools, you can collect crucial business data from disparate systems and collate them into actionable insights. It gives deeper insights about revenue growth, productivity improvements, and cost savings. These details empower you to check how much you invested vs how much you saved through automation. Such information provides the financial aspects of automation and makes you aware of the financial benefits. Good ROI can help you convince senior management about the feasibility of RPA projects and enable you to roll out automation at a larger scale to maximize ROI further.
3. Improve Business Outcomes
Once you are well-versed with using basic RPA analytics, you should be able to advance it by using artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics. It helps you know meaningful patterns from historic business data and gives you various actionable insights to increase your business outcomes. For example, in the manufacturing industry, machine parts failure is a common problem that causes disruption and work stagnation.
Advanced RPA analytics tools help manufacturing enterprises to know in advance about a possible failure so that managers can act on time and ensure business continuity with “Zero Downtime’. Moreover, it helps in taking better and more informed business decisions from both operations and strategic points of view.
There are many popular business intelligence tools available in the market but do not provide great visibility and business insights at a granular level about automated processes as required. Using advanced RPA tools, you can have a clear understanding of automation. Transparent, accurate, and real-time analytics helps organizations to work on the shortcomings at the earliest and makes their automation projects a success. Further, vital business insights enable organizations to improve efficiency, productivity, and overall throughput by a significant margin.
Key RPA Metrics to Focus
There are various key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide the health of an automation system. But out of all, the below mentioned are more vital to track using advanced RPA analytics.
- Total Automated Process: Count of all live automated processes operating through RPA technology.
- Implementation Cost: Reflects the money required to roll out RPA technology. It involves process discovery, documentation, bot development, debugging, and training cost.
- Cycle Time: It tells how much time automation takes to complete a single operation. You can gauge how fast the work is completed as compared to a non-automated business environment and how much time you saved.
- Accuracy: RPA solutions are crafted to achieve almost 100% accuracy. Whether it is achieving this goal or not, this tracker will guide you better.
- Break-Fix Cycle: This vital KPI reveals how many times an automated process broke or required maintenance.
- Average Automation Uptime: It indicates the total duration of RPA bots availability. Although it starts with 100% (and should be 100%) but due to unplanned errors, it sometimes drops down to a certain extent.
- Throughput: Total output generated through automation in a particular period of time.
- Expected Business Value: It consolidates many important KPIs like cost, cycle time, accuracy, etc., and provides the real feasibility of implementing RPA solutions.
Final Words
In today’s digital age, data has become the most crucial asset for any organization. It is a valuable resource that if analyzed properly can provide you with priceless business insights. Automated analytics and reporting can save an enterprise’s significant amount of time and money. Also, it proves beneficial in improving business outcomes by leaps and bounds. Thus to take the business to greater heights, just like RPA’s implementation and maintenance, proper and timely analysis of data is also required.