Insights ROI TimeSaved Value Negative

The business ROI Insights dashboard shows negative hours.

Issue Description

How does ROI work/Why is TimeSaved negative?

Explanation

For Unattended Robot, execution time does not really matter. Consider a process that takes a human 20 minutes to complete and a Robot 30 minutes to complete. The Robot is required to complete the process, because the Robot is cheaper and by having the Robot complete the task, 20 minutes of time is saved, even if it takes the Robot 30 minutes to complete it.

As such for an Unattended Robot, the proper formula should be (${processmanualvalues.total_time}/60). What this formula represents is basically (Manual Time)*(Number of Transactions)

Additionally, when looking into ROI/TimeSaved, considerations should be made on how the process works and what represents a “Transaction”.

Planned for the 23.10 the above formula will be the default. The current formula applies for Attended automations and should be modified for Unattended.

For Attended Robots, the Robot Execution time matters, so the formula for Time Saved should incorporate Robot execution time.

Why?

  1. First, remember that Insights can only report on the data that is ingested from Orchestrator. That means any report has to be based on datapoints that are captured in Orchestrator.
  2. Consider a process that looks in a folder and processes every file in that folder. The process looks in that folder, processes the item and then repeats the process.
  3. The automation keeps running until all files are processed. Each file represents a transaction or unit of work.
  4. Now, try to calculate time savings by using the Business ROI dashboard. This dashboard will not work.
    • The time-saving formula is based on (Manual Time)*(Number of Transactions), where (Number of Transactions) = Number of times the process executed.
    • However, for the specific process at hand, the number of times the process was executed is not representative of the number of transactions. This is because each file in the input directory is the transactions.
  5. As such, a formula is needed that incorporates the number of files the process processed during execution. In other words, for this process, (Total Number of Transactions) = Total number of files processed.
  6. Additionally, how is this data being captured in Orchestrator? Is it possible to report that in Insights? And the answer would be that if I am using QueueItems then it is. See the Insights data model here: Insights - Data Model.
  7. If not using queueItems and its transactional then there is a problem. The data is typically not captured in Orchestrator. Why?
    • To capture this data, have a special mechanism in Orchestrator where it would registry when a document is processed. For example, an activity called 'Capture Transaction Count' could be present. This would be mapped to the data model of process and could be used in ROI/Time Saving operations
    • This mechanism is present and is called QueueItems
  8. As a best practice, it is always recommended to use QueueItems for transaction-based processes (these processes loop over and over running the same process during a single execution).
  9. Additionally, it is always recommended that RPA designers make sure to think about what reporting they want to do for a given automation and to make sure they are capturing those data points.


If there are processes that are transactional and not using queueItems, then the options are:

  1. Use QueueItems. Even if the QueueItem is created and then processed right away (best approach, works out of the box).
  2. Estimate how many transactions on average an instance of the process executes. For example, if it processes a thousand documents. per month, and on average runs once a week, and the manual time is 15 minutes per document, we would calculate our manual time as follows: 1000*15/7
  3. Use custom variables. Have a field called TotalDocuments. This is not recommended because it tends to get convoluted and leads to processes that need to have customized formulas for ROI.