How to Calculate RPA ROI

Once you get an RPA project up and running, how do you know if it's successful or not? How do you measure the ROI? 

I'm going to walk you through, in real time, how to calculate RPA ROI for your project. To show you how we can do this, we're going to take a real Fortra RPA customer example and walk you through the analysis.

• Visit this page to get access to the RPA Toolkit and download the RPA ROI Calculator 

There’s just a few steps to follow:

1. Establish a baseline expectation, which is that in RPA, aim for a five-for-one return on your investment. Meaning for every dollar you put in, you're getting five back, or for every pound you put in, or whatever your currency is, you get five back. It sounds like an ambitious goal, but we work with thousands of customers on these projects, and we're seeing, in many cases, much more than five-for-one, but we think five-for-one is a good starting point to aim for.
2. Identify a few tasks that fit our RPA criteria. What are those criteria? It's repetitive, rule-based, high-volume, prone to human error. If you want more details, you can take a look at the video we released last month, which goes through this in a little more detail. Collect the data and your inputs about these tasks to put into your calculator.
3. Open up the calculator and begin to put that data in. So in the interest of time, we've actually pre-populated some of this data into the calculator.
4. Run and analyze the data. There's a couple of different pieces of data we want to take a look at. First is, if you look at your overall Fortra automation platform investment over a three-year period, you're looking about, roughly, $240,000 in this specific example. But take a look at this. Look at your ROI summary. And this is really where, I think, the magic kind of happens, if you will, right? So in Year 1, you're already seeing a 93% ROI, which is fantastic. But take a look at three and five years out. Talk about transformative, right? This is really the kind of impact we're looking for. And if you think back to what I spoke about a couple of minutes ago, that five-for-one goal, this gets you real close to it, doesn't it? Pretty amazing stuff.