Realizing ROI with Chris McCarley from TTI

Krista White: Thanks, Chris, for sitting down with me today.

Chris McCarley: Thanks for having me.

Krista White: So here at Driven, you put up a lot of big numbers on TTI savings based on their automation projects. Can you tell me a little bit about how you guys get started with a new automation project? How do you find what you're going to do?

Chris McCarley: Okay, so it's a good question, and it was kind of a theme of my talk today, and that's how do we get a win? How do we get wins with RPA? So I can say that from the beginning, we had a form that we used to vet any case that somebody has. So they say, "Hey, I think a bot would be really good for this." That's nice. Here, fill out this form. The form includes, what does it do, but also, give us an idea of ROI. How many people do this? How many hours a day or a week or a month are they doing this operation? So we can decide it's worth the complexity of implementing or not. So that's part of it.

Chris McCarley: Another thing, as I mentioned in my talk today, a big theme is look for taking away their pain. So if you try to focus on the hours too much or just taking stuff off their plate, yeah, you might get a win. But if you didn't take away their pain, you're not going to get as big a win. When you take away their pain and they get a taste for what it's like without it, when they know what it's like, the difference you made in their life, they don't want to give it up. They do not want to go back to the way they were, which helps because you get the buy-in and trust as opposed to trying to put something on them. They're like, "Oh, okay, maybe I'll try it out and maybe not."

Krista White: I always talk about ROI as greater than just your numbers game.

Chris McCarley: Yeah.

Krista White: I really like the feeling that employees have, so-

Chris McCarley: Yeah.

Krista White: Speaking of ROI, how does TTI actually measure ... What mechanism are you using to actually measure the ROI of these RPA implementations?

Chris McCarley: Okay. So as I said, we engage with our stakeholders, our subject matter experts and say, "Okay, tell us what ROI you think you're going to get from this." And we'll push back. We had some big numbers mentioned ... 600K in estimated dispute reclaiming we got. But we used some techniques to kind of review that. We don't just take their word for it. And in another case, they gave us this huge number of hours, and we pushed back on it, but they gave us good answers. This many, 140 roughly, they said doing in hours a day, like every day of the week. We actually, and I wanted to vet the number before I mentioned it here. We actually cut that back, scaled back, because we don't want to inflate anything. It'll come back on us.

Chris McCarley: So we actually cut their estimate down to a quarter. And it still came out to be 33,000 hours estimated savings once this fully ramps up, so-

Krista White: You guys get a lot of people coming to you and saying, "I want to automate this."

Chris McCarley: We do. A question I got today was how do you know ... You've done your initial set of bots. How do you go and find them? And the answer is that's the easiest thing. We just sit, we don't sit back, but they come to us. We have new people saying, "Hey, I heard you do this bot." In some cases, we've done it, we have the North American division, we call NDC. We have Europe, and we have Asia, and we kind of ... And so they all have similar business problems, some unique. And so we've kind of focused on North America, but now the other divisions are saying, "Hey, we heard you're doing this. Can you apply that kind of bot to our business?"

Chris McCarley: So we're starting to take on, we just couldn't take everything on at once. So we're starting to branch out there. And then we get things that just come randomly at us. Somebody, don't even know how, they heard, "Hey, you're doing bots. You know, can we get in on that?" So yeah, it's coming to us a lot at this point.

Krista White: I love that.

Chris McCarley: Yeah.

Krista White: Well, thanks for sitting down with us and for presenting-

Chris McCarley: Thank you-

Krista White: Here at Driven. If you like this video and other videos like it, you can subscribe to our channel here on YouTube.