Saving 350.000 euro annually by using robotization. Wouldn’t that be nice? For most departments there’s a huge potential for automation which can easily be unlocked. How? With a Process Automation Scan.
Automate processes with RPA
Organizations will think twice before making changes to their processes. The focus is often too much on the as-is situation. Why change something when it's going all well? However, if you want to stay relevant, you need to change regularly. Nowadays, it is quite common to only have a human workforce. In a few years, it will be normal to have a digital workforce as well.
No idea how a robot can help you? Read more about Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
RPA is the future. When are you going to start using this technique? Every day you’ll wait, the competitor's advantage will become bigger. To find out which processes are ideal for robots, you need to analyze them. And frankly, such an analysis can be quite difficult. It takes time, knowledge and attention. Besides, these skills and resources are often not immediately available. Let us facilitate that change for you. Get a Process Automation Scan (the “PAS”).
The Process Automation Scan in practice
To explain how the PAS works, we use an example from one of our customers in the manufacturing industry. This organization defined a concrete goal: "By 2021 we want to reduce the waste in administrative processes by ten percent”. Sounds like a clear goal, but it also raises a lot of questions. Where do you start? How do you start? What technologies do you use? To make it even more complex, this is a successful organization. As a result, there is a lot of work to be done. The pressure is high and there is always a short-term project that’s more important than a strategic change. For these reasons, our customer asked us to help with determining where and how to start the automation journey.
Gain insight into processes
The organization first needed an overview of all business processes. While doing that research, we also determined the automation potential within these processes. Over the years, the organization has always been working on small process optimizations. No big changes, but just small tweaks to make the processes suitable for the current situation. Meanwhile, new processes and other systems have been added as a result of a recent merger. As a result, tasks in similar situations are performed in different ways and the data is ending up in various systems.
A closer look to the Supply Chain for RPA opportunities
The starting point for this analysis was the Supply Chain. Using robotics within a Supply Chain environment is a very logical step and great starting point. In order to determine how RPA can contribute to the goals of the organization, clear guidelines are required. So it was time to perform the process automation scan (PAS). The PAS is a short project of a maximum of two weeks and consists of four steps.
Intake interview: to get off to a good start, together with the customer we determined which departments to analyze.
General kick-off: RPA as a concept and robots as your digital colleagues were introduced within the teams in an online interactive kick-off session.
Interviews: during the interviews, all processes per department or team were discussed. Because the designated employees were subject-matter experts in practice, we could quickly get to the core. They knew exactly which manual repetitive tasks took a lot of their valuable time or where in the process the chance of error was the greatest. The processes were gathered and analyzed for each interview in an hour and a half.
Final presentation: finally, it was up to us to convert this information into advice. We made an extensive business case for the top five processes and covered the other processes in a value assessment. A roadmap was made based on the outcome of the business cases. Of course, we focused on the bigger goal here; ten percent ‘waste reduction’ in administrative processes.
What was the outcome of the process automation scan?
The advice report of the PAS quickly showed that the organization could achieve the ten percent waste reduction objective. The roadmap also endorsed this. The portfolio consisted of automating four processes that save more than one and a half FTE. The return on investment of this investment is only six months.
By starting the journey in this way, we have laid a solid foundation for automation and at the same time the organization is now familiar with the value and the possibilities. Next to the initial scope, there are seventeen more processes ready to be automated in the next phase. In total, the organization could save more than four FTE (this means an annual saving of 375.000 euro). Apart from the savings, there are other aspects the company could benefit from. Think of higher customer experience, better employee satisfaction, lower error margins and more time for valuable work.
It almost sounds too good to be true, right? This organization has now made a solid start by building the first robots and they have a clear view on how to proceed
Let’s meet!
Do you also want to start automating, but don’t know exactly where to start? Do you want to know which processes are the best candidate for automation? Or are you just curious whether investing in robots yields enough value? Then the Process Automation Scan is the solution you need. We would be happy to discuss the possibilities with you! Please fill in the form below or contact Sacha van Essen directly at [email protected].
