Leslie Willcocks
Professor Emeritus
London School of Economics and Political Science
“What impacts can RPA have on businesses, and other enterprises?”
At the start of our research, in 2014, there were few RPA users, and we chose to look at only the most successful. What surprised us was the multiple benefits they were getting—many unplanned for, and completely unexpected. Organisations tended to be going for a return on investment, and were looking to lower the cost of operations. They were getting ROI of anything between 30 percent and 200 percent in the first 2 years, depending on the process. They were saving large amounts of time—what became called the ‘hours back to the business’ metric. Work was being done faster, cheaper, more accurately, 24x7, with strong audit trails.
Then regulated industries like energy, insurance and banking found they could get quicker regulatory compliance when regulators changed the rules, thus avoiding large fines for non-compliance. One UK insurance company, for example, turned to automation after paying out a £8.4 million fine for non-compliance.
Fundamentally, organisations were finding that more work could be done, with the same or fewer numbers of people. At the same time the customer service and experiences were being addressed and enhanced—queries, insurance policies processed, repayments processed more quickly, more customised treatment. Then employees were appreciating the improvements in their work loads and type of work they were doing. Some were being moved to working directly in the CofE (Centre of Excellence) and becoming specialists in automation.
But as more companies moved into RPA, and our research base widened, we found that this triple win for shareholders, customers and employees was by no means the common experience. Some of the reasons for this were to do with the limitations of the software—not everything called RPA is the same, and some vendor products are difficult to scale to enterprise level. But our second book, ‘Robotic Process Automation and Risk Mitigation’, detailed some 41 material risks that emerged, and the many management actions that could be taken to get the triple win. We learned these from the successful companies—we now have some 39 of what we call ‘Action Principles’, which we have published widely. A lot of managers are still working through how to deal with those risks but our latest work suggests that at the back of it they need a much more strategic vision to get the payoffs that we know are there from applying these automation technologies.