Measuring automation success beyond cost savings

Cost savings are the easiest automation metric to calculate and the easiest to misread. A process that is cheaper but slower or less accurate has not improved.

Track four things

Cycle time (how long end to end), error rate (how often humans must fix the output), coverage (how much of the volume is handled automatically) and satisfaction (how the people who use it feel).

Watch the exceptions

The cases automation cannot handle tell you where to invest next. Log them, categorise them, and review them monthly.