6. Workforce impact

This can be tracked by several metrics that take into account manual labour savings (in terms of the number of labour hours saved per year), the reduction in case workload per tax, and the number of employees reallocated.

Full-time equivalents (FTEs) are the typical way to operationalise labour savings, but you can also look at the costs involved by hiring, training, and salary. We recommend assessment in periods of high demand (e.g., end of the month), because this is when the costs are highest.

The scalability of software robots can be a valuable asset to be used in such times in order to reduce expenses. It makes it likely that the marginal cost of scaling the robotic workforce during peak periods is less than the average cost of handling everything manually.

7. Tool utilization

Prior to RPA deployment, take stock of the number and kind (i.e., either automations or manual ones) of tools that are needed to carry out a certain process, so that you can then estimate the costs.

For an accurate measurement, make sure you also include licensing fees, maintenance, and development costs, as well as the cost of training employees to use them. Compare this with a similar approximation of the RPA tool costs. The latter is going to be lower because the bots do not need to be operated from individual machines, but rather in a centralised manner.

8. Cycle time

This is a measure of process velocity, or the amount of time necessary to complete a process. Since bots never tire and never need to take a break to ruminate on the meaning of life, RPA results in significantly lower cycle times.

You can see this for yourself by comparing the amount of time it takes human employees to execute a given process with the time it takes a bot. Since cycle time depends on the total volume of work, which is variable, we recommend that you anchor the two estimations to periods which are similar in this respect.

9. Employee retention rate

Employee turnover is rather costly; according to a Center for American Progress study the median cost is over a fifth of the annual employee salary. RPA can support retention by taking over the highly repetitive tasks which are among those with the highest turnover.

Employees are thus relieved from the burden of monotonous, uninteresting tasks, and free to focus on higher value tasks which are also business-critical and thus leave the staff more fulfilled, satisfied, and less likely to leave the company.

Contrasting retention rate before and after RPA implementation is a relevant indicator of automation driven gains. However, it is a longer term metric because employees’ reaction takes time to form and manifest itself behaviourally.

10. Employee satisfaction

This is a qualitative measure of employee engagement on the short term. All you need to do to use it as an indicator of RPA profitability is to ask your employees to fill in surveys regarding satisfaction with their roles and workloads before and after automation.

You should initiate surveys in those department mostly affected by automation. The expectation is that the less manual repetitive tasks employees must perform, the more their job satisfaction will increase and the more engaged they will be.

A necessary precondition is that the staff is well trained into what automation can and what it cannot do. This so that they do not fall prey to the ‘robots will steal our jobs’ attitude, which would make them rather hostile to software robots. This is why gaining the confidence of people in your organisation is a top practice for a successful automation journey, which facilitates scaling up.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that RPA performance metrics help you evaluate the progress towards the goals that you are set on when deciding to embark on the automation journey. Availability of such a wide range of metrics serves to make an even more convincing case for the utility of RPA deployment. They can provide an exhaustive analysis from the perspective of selected criteria that you consider most relevant for attaining your goals.