Estimate ROI and Automation Benefits with a LeanOps Assessment

Minimizing costs and efficient operations are top priorities for every kind of business in the competitive market. Lean operations or LeanOps aids in achieving this by optimizing internal functions and productivity and maximizing ROI with a bigger bottom line. This concept has been around for almost a century helping companies find better, faster, and less costly ways of operation.

What is a LeanOps Assessment?

A LeanOps Assessment is an HGS-designed framework that aids in estimating the ROI and benefits clients can expect from the automation of their business processes. It also checks for the technical fitment of process automation and defines an RPA implementation roadmap. This technology/RPA tool agnostic assessment is suitable for any RPA tool and the assessment typically takes 3-4 weeks for ten business processes.

Apart from covering RPA implementation assessment, the framework also covers other aspects of business, such as process reengineering, process remapping, digital transformation, and consolidation of applications.

LeanOps Assessment is recommended for clients who want to:

• Embark on the RPA journey
• Expand RPA to enterprise level
• Expand RPA to other departments
• Expand RPA to a large set of business processes
• Identify potential benefits for their investments in automation

It is strongly recommended to estimate the ROI and automation benefits before investing in automation.

Tool-based vs manual LeanOps Assessment

A LeanOps Assessment is performed both by leveraging tools (process mining, task mining, and task capture tools) and manually. HGS deploys plug-ins on the users’ machines to capture details on the processes, steps, systems, and data for a period of 7-10 days in the central server to further analyze the process data.

For manual assessments, process discovery sessions are conducted with process SMEs to capture the process data. The assessment also takes employee feedback into account for gathering the process data.

Although there isn’t a significant difference in the accuracy between the two methods, using tools during the assessment greatly reduces the number of face-to-face meetings thereby reducing the overall assessment time.

The typical deliverables of a LeanOps Assessment

The LeanOps Assessment reports that the clients receive are very comprehensive and include details regarding:

• Consolidated and individual ROI/automation benefits
• Categorization of processes
• Observations
• Recommendations
• Roadmap
• Prioritization of processes for automation
• As-Is and To-Be process

As part of the automation benefits, the following data points are calculated and presented to the clients:

• Percentage reduction of manual hours
• Percentage reduction in AHT/TAT
• Cost savings through automation
• Percentage of automation coverage
• Percentage reduction in human errors
• Percentage of estimated three-year ROI
• Percentage increase in productivity
• Reduction in the number of FTEs
• Increase or decrease in employee or customer satisfaction
• Payback period

The benefits of LeanOps Assessment

Without a deep understanding of an organization’s processes, companies often find themselves having to overcome wasted resources, heavy incurred costs, unproductive downtimes, repetitive processes, longer timelines, and other inefficiencies. By improving on these aspects, a company is better positioned to offer value to its customers. This is typically achieved through optimized and more deliberate workforce structure, facility, and processes.

LeanOps Assessment helps with the in-depth analysis of the organization’s processes and finding more efficient and tangible means to achieve business goals. It can identify whether a process is a good technical fit for automation or not and then the tangible and non-tangible benefits are calculated to help the client prioritize and select processes with higher ROI.

The assessment report also gives visibility into when the automation initiative will be self-funded and estimates the return on every dollar invested in automation. The department heads can then use this comprehensive report to prepare a business case for seeking management approval on projects and funding.

Banking, retail, manufacturing, and logistics are some of the industry sectors that have greatly benefitted from HGS’s LeanOps Assessment. The following case study demonstrates how HGS was able to help one of its clients in the banking sector.

HGS LeansOps Assessment Case Study

HGS conducted LeanOps Assessment for over 50+ processes for its client, out of which, over 20 processes were found to be feasible for automation that would double the ROI with 2.2 million estimated net savings over a period of five years.

Business Requirements/Problem:

• Discover potential processes for automation from service desk, contact center, fraud management, backend operations, and Electronic Record Management business areas
• Calculate their ROI/automation benefits
• Define an RPA roadmap

HGS Approach/Solution:

• Discovery sessions to gather process details
• Technical and financial assessment for automation
• Calculation of ROI, automation benefits, and payback periods

Business Outcome:

• Shortlisted 20+ processes for automation
• Prioritization of automations
• RPA implementation roadmap
• Automation benefits
• RPA tool identification

Application/Technologies:

• Core banking systems
• Fiserv’s Anti-Money Laundering alert system
• VISA
• Service Desk website
• Customer feedback management
• Data in Microsoft excels
• Record management applications
• Contact Center applications

The goal of a company should be to provide perfect value to the customers through optimized processes with maximized performance and zero wastage. A LeanOps Assessment guides a company to become high functioning and deliver top-tier performance. HGS recommends performing assessments on processes across various departments to identify the ones with a strong potential for successful RPA implementation.