Creating an RPA Business Case

When you plan your RPA journey, you want to look for the highest-volume processes that would have the biggest impact on your bottom line. Also consider other benefits RPA can bring like increasing employee satisfaction, efficiency gains, generating revenue, enhanced data quality, and even streamlining compliance. These processes are not all limited to one department, so make sure you investigate automation opportunities spanning your entire enterprise. Sometimes it’s best to start small and determine the best place for automating processes in your organization, then scale later. 

Consider processes like report generation and distribution, employee onboarding, mortgage processing, or other essential use cases. Ultimately, your organization’s RPA journey is up to you. But knowing and understanding the transformative role that automation has played and will continue to play in the future—and finding a robust RPA solution that grows with you—is vital for how you plan to move forward.

As you consider RPA solutions for your organization, it’s important to make sure you have a budget in mind so you can identify the RPA technology that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. It will also enable you to realize value faster and guarantee a successful implementation. Begin by asking yourself these four key questions as you determine your budget and decide which solution will provide the most value.

The next step for gaining buy-in is to analyze RPA solutions in the market. It’s important to have all the facts and fully research the solutions that will best fit your budget and your needs. Ensure you have taken time to gather reliable information that will empower you to make a decision to pursue digital transformation through RPA in your business. Check out the RPA Buyer’s Guide that provides a summary of RPA trends, benefits, and automation options, poses critical questions that you should ask as you research your options, and shows you how to get the most out of an RPA software trial.

The key to gaining a competitive edge through automation is finding software that meets your unique current needs and scales to your future vision with minimal additional cost beyond your initial investment. Once you’ve shortlisted RPA solutions, then learn how to build an automation strategy for your organization that delivers real RPA ROI. Take advantage of our exclusive Robotic Process Automation Toolkit that offers actionable insights, tools, and resources—right at your fingertips—to optimize RPA in your organization, including a weighted matrix to prioritize automation opportunities, a best practices guide to pinpoint which automation method to use, and an ROI calculator to identify and calculate your RPA ROI.

Trying an RPA solution before you go all-in not only lets you test out RPA, but also helps you find the right solution for your unique organizational needs and get comfortable with the software. Look for vendors that can offer end-to-end process support, while also having the capabilities to become fully operational quickly. Also, identify which factors to plan for when evaluating the ROI of RPA software in our Maximizing RPA ROI Guide. 

Because you have defined ROI metrics that determine success, you should also be able to easily measure the results of your pilot use case. Examine how the automated process went, document what went well, and what you think could have been improved. Then compare the costs of implementation, deployment, and maintenance against how much time is saved, how much accuracy improved, and how little human intervention is required. Show the effects of the status quo versus the potential RPA solution to reveal the results of your analysis. Doing this will enable you to determine if you want to move forward to gain approval for investing fully in the RPA solution.