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How to Measure the Value of Production Automation

  • Featured Insights
  • April 19, 2023

We believe one of the core foundational pillars of any Automation Program is the ability to collect, visualize and analyze robot data. Using dashboards, a fleet of bots can be monitored, maintained, and measured to ensure optimal performance and low running costs. Dashboards play an important role in managing enterprise robotic operations. 

To put it simply, dashboards are collections of data visualizations that provide deep visibility into important bot metrics such as Bot performance, health checks, issues and errors on a real-time basis, volumes of work completed, overall costs, and benefit measurements for the overall automation program. 

Streamlines Processes

Like managing a human workforce, keeping track of your digital workforce’s productivity is important. The productivity of robots depends on the amount of work they complete – more work completed translates to more robot productivity. So, it becomes largely important for an organization to ensure that its robots are being fully utilized.

Every Robotic Operations Center should have a dashboard that provides visibility into a bot and virtual machine utilization. Using this data, the operations staff can optimally reorganize the enterprise workload by completing as many tasks as possible while using fewer resources. Such dashboards provide information on how frequently bots have been utilized within a selected time frame.  

These dashboards are typically in a column chart form and are built by taking the total time a bot has run within the selected period and dividing it by the amount of time the bot could have been run. For the best results, there should be separate dashboards for daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and all-time bot utilization. For example, the most common visualizations included in a robot utilization dashboard are: 

Total Utilization  The total utilization, in hours, for both attended and unattended robots. 
Top 10 Busiest Robots by Process Name  The robots that spent the most time executing each process. 
Today’s Utilization Breakdown  Displays the time each robot worked over the previous 24 hours. 
Avg Utilization/Day per Robot  Average hours worked per day, for each robot. 
Daily License % Utilization  The maximum daily license utilization, in percent, for all runtime types. 
Daily License Utilization (max value)  Daily maximum number of licenses utilized per runtime type. 
Last 7 Days Runtime Consumption  The maximum number of daily runtimes consumed compared to available per machine for the last 7 days. 

Transactions

Like managing a human workforce, keeping track of your digital workforce’s productivity is important. The productivity of robots depends on the amount of work they complete – more work completed translates to more robot productivity. So, it becomes largely important for an organization to ensure that its robots are being fully utilized.

Every Robotic Operations Center should have a dashboard that provides visibility into a bot and virtual machine utilization. Using this data, the operations staff can optimally reorganize the enterprise workload by completing as many tasks as possible while using fewer resources. Such dashboards provide information on how frequently bots have been utilized within a selected time frame.

These dashboards are typically in a column chart form and are built by taking the total time a bot has run within the selected period and dividing it by the amount of time the bot could have been run. For the best results, there should be separate dashboards for daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and all-time bot utilization. For example, the most common visualizations included in a robot utilization dashboard are:

Filters Date: This YearJob Status: Successful

Money Saved

$62,464

Davs to Goal – 8.00

Hours

1,297 Hrs

Goal for this year

$62,464

Top 10 Time-Saving Processes

Money Saved per Process

Streamlines Processes

Transactional dashboards are a necessary form of a dashboard for any process that uses queues and transactions. They help make sure that bots are performing the work they are built for and that they are completing it successfully.

Historical transaction dashboards are a useful tool for evaluating how an organization’s bots have performed historically and how much value the bots have been adding to the business. In these dashboards, you can quantify exactly how many transactions have been performed over time and can use the data to measure the real cost benefits and human hours saved as a direct result of implementing automation. Visualizations included in a transactional dashboard include:

Completed Items  Displays a cumulative total of all transactions processed to date. 
Queues   The total number of queues.  
Transactions by Status   The total number of transactions, including retried transactions, for each state: Successful - Abandoned - Failed  
Transactions by Date   AThe total number of transactions per day, with a breakdown by Successful and Failed status.  
Weekly Exception Breakdown  The total number of exceptions for each week, with a breakdown by exception type: Application Exception or Business Exception.  
Avg Transaction Duration Per Queue  Displays the average handling time, in seconds, for each item per queue.  
Exceptions   Pivot table displaying the Queue Name, Robot Name, Exception Type, Reason, and # Errors foranalysis. 

Business ROI

Filters Folder: Include AllDate:This & Last Month

Want to know how much time and money your automation program is saving? Business ROI dashboards combine robot utilization, transactions, and fixed values to display the value of the work these automatons are performing. A few things to keep in mind with ROI dashboards:
You must identify where timesaving occurs within each process
  • 1Transactional – Each transaction is a unit of measurement for productivity.
  • 2Procedural – Each job run is a unit of measurement for productivity.
  • 3You must assign fixed values to calculate ROI.
  • 4Transactional – Dollars per hour that you would pay an employee to process a transaction.
  • 5Procedural – Dollars per hour that you would pay an employee to complete a task end to end
  • 6Once fixed values are assigned and data is collected for robot utilization and transactions processed, you then must configure your dashboards so that each process refers to a fixed dollar value and multiplies them by either transactional or utilization data.
After this information is collected, reviewed, and confirmed to be correct, you can then create multiple visualizations that will provide valuable insight into the performance of your production automation. Some examples include:
Money Saved   Displays the current total of money saved based upon the value entered in the Process Baselines widget, as well as the days until your defined goal is reached at the current rate.  
Time Saved   Displays the current total time saved based upon the Manual Time value entered in the Process Baselines widget. Static display of your defined goal value.  
Goal for Year   This widget must be manually defined.  
Productivity   The total hours worked by all robots to date.  
Hours Saved per Process  Breakdown of the time saved per process to date, based upon the Manual Time value entered in the Process Baselines widget. Displays the Top 10 according to this calculation.  
Money Saved per Process  Breakdown of the money saved per process to date, based upon the values entered in the Process Baselines widget.  
Cumulative Time Saved   Total time saved for each week, with a breakdown per process.