Solving the Mystery of Analytics

Most of our customers are in a stage of their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) journey where they have moved well beyond the question of “should we automate?” and “what can we automate?” to the more challenging question of “how is our automation doing?” Their bots have been successfully deployed and they have begun experiencing the many benefits of process automation including faster processing, fewer errors, and overall lower costs. Now, they are wondering what else RPA can do for them.

The answer I always give to this question is analytics. Personally, I find analytics to be cool. With analytics you get to play the role of a detective like Sherlock Holmes. Analytics data lets you see answers to puzzles that would not normally be apparent and helps you solve business mysteries. The problem people have with analytics is that most tools, which help capture and analyze data, are not user-friendly.

Thankfully, things have gotten easier. There is no longer a need for lengthy integration projects and technical skill prerequisites. Modern analytics can help solve data questions faster and easier than ever before. And nowhere is this more apparent than in RPA. It is universally accepted that RPA expedites processes, makes them more cost-effective and better. But the actual degree in which these improvements help is often uncertain. This is a job for analytics.

Back to our customers’ journeys — I find that after a few successful process automations they roll the project into a center of excellence (CoE). A CoE is a multi-departmental project were technologies or processes are shared across different parts of a company. While not every company uses the term CoE, or even has one, most are aware of the concept. In a perfect world, all the data from various RPA projects could be rolled up into one location and visualized in a dashboard. If this happened, Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be necessary to solve the mystery of data.

Solving the mystery behind analytics reveals the actual return on investment (ROI). ROI is the single best metric to validate a technology project and is usually the hardest to calculate. Multiple metrics, aggregation of data silos, and the raw effort of putting it all together in a single interface make ROI a tough mystery to solve. Sherlock Holmes might just give up here.

Luckily for Sherlock, we have just released the CoE Dashboard. The CoE Dashboard automatically takes data and activities from multiple bots and rolls them up into a single visual. No data integration projects or mysteries to solve here. ROI is automatically calculated by task, process, and department, all in a single dashboard. It couldn’t be easier. Mystery solved. Analytics is fun again. Sherlock is out of work.