The 6 Benefits of Value Mapping and Assessing Your Automation Estate

A lot of organizations find themselves in a troubling situation. They spent so much time and effort automating everything and anything they could, believing automation was a clear-cut cost saver and attempting to recover RPA’s CapEX (capital expenditures).

While they realized initial benefits and returns, that rushed approach has led to several damaging consequences like:

• poor design practices
• automating the wrong processes
• not automating the right ones
• failing to improve and optimize processes before automating them
• not aligning processes to high-level business objectives
• and allowing process knowledge to walk out the door due to turnover and a lack of commitment to documentation, standardization, and governance

The result is that organizations don’t understand their automation estate. They don’t know what they have or how much money and effort they’re wasting on maintenance, which processes are redundant, and which automations are off-task or don’t deliver meaningful value.

That’s why many organizations are turning to Value Mapping, a comprehensive assessment of one or several automated processes to clean out what’s not working and reduce costs while getting leaner and more efficient.

Learn More: What is Value Mapping: Everything You Need to Know

Beyond the high-level cost reduction and increases in efficiency, here are the top 6 benefits organizations realize by performing a Value Mapping exercise and analyzing their automation estate.

#1 - Significantly Reducing Automation’s Total Cost of Ownership

Value Mapping enables you to identify where there’s waste and redundancy in your automations to lower maintenance costs or even OpEX (operational expenses) when you’re paying by the bot.

It also helps you identify if re-platforming your automation estate to a better RPA platform is right for you, enabling a significant reduction in licensing fees.

#2 - Removing Redundancies in Automation Estates and Processes to Reduce Costs

Through the Value Map Assessments Blueprint’s conducted to date, we’ve found that on average, 20-30% of an organization’s automation estate is redundant.

By helping companies identify where there are redundancies in their automations and providing recommendations on how they can be removed, we’ve enabled them to recoup that 20-30%. If you’re spending $1,000,000 a year on running your automation estate, that’s $200,000-300,000 that you could be saving annually by performing a Value Map Assessment.    

#3 - Addressing Unnecessarily Complex Automations

A lot of automated processes are unnecessarily complex. Complexity increases the risk of outages and drives up maintenance costs.

A Value Map Assessment identifies where automations are unnecessarily complex and makes actionable recommendations on how they can be simplified and optimized to mitigate risk and lower OpEX.

#4 - Discovering if Re-platforming is a Good Financial and Operational Bet

A solid Value Map Assessment can identify how much of your automation estate can be ported over to a new RPA tool and remove costly, labor-intensive manual effort.

So, if you’ve been thinking about your options in the RPA vendor market, Value Mapping might be just the thing you need before you take any more leaps of faith.

#5 - Getting Insight on Individual Automations

Without a Value Map, the only way to really understand an individual automation is by reading code to decipher what the automation does. A Value Map Assessment does this for you, and it also provides you with best-practice suggestions on micro-automations to improve them and further reduce complexity, risk, and future maintenance headaches.

#6 - Understanding the Entirety of Your Automation Estate

Value Mapping can also finally give you the visibility that’s been eluding you. Organizations that have already completed Value Map Assessments get a holistic understanding of what they have, in addition to optimization, reuse, and retirement recommendations to become more efficient and reduce costs.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, there’s just one small snag with Value Map Assessments. Historically, the only way to perform one was by either devoting internal resources to assess your automations and report on their findings or hiring a third party like a consultancy or service integrator.

Both options aren’t great options. They’re expensive and they’ll take weeks and maybe even months to deliver anything tangible, and even then, because most of the work is manual, how reliable are their findings and data really?

Blueprint, on the other hand, offers a Value Map Assessment that is automated – in addition to having insight and analysis added manually by one of our automation experts – so you get actionable, accurate insight in days instead of weeks or months. It’s also a much more cost-effective option.

What’s more, the first consultation is totally free!

Schedule your free consultation with one of our solutions experts today to see how your automation estate can be radically improved to reduce costs and increase efficiency.