Create a Business Case for Robots

If you’re reading this post, you see that robotics can positively impact your company’s productivity, safety, or both, but you need to prove it to your team, your boss, yourself, and possibly your boss’ boss’ boss. We’ll walk you through developing a concise business case for robots and you can download our framework for free.

Step 1 – Spot Inefficiencies & Risks

Look around your work environment, whether it be a manufacturing facility, construction site, office building, or outside, and you’ll see numerous places of concern for both safety and efficiency. Look for bottlenecks and roadblocks to getting things done, tasks that take more people or equipment than they should take, and jobs that people don’t want to do.

Ask team members and people in other departments, including HR, what tasks make people quit and those that are hard to fill. Most likely, those tasks are dirty, dangerous, or dull, which makes them great tasks for robots.

Another great resource is the Health and Safety team. They understand what jobs are dangerous, and some tasks may only be dangerous when done repetitively like bending over to fasten wood with screws.

Example Inefficient and Risky Tasks:

• Inspecting a confined space
• Cleaning underneath a pallet shredder
• SWAT team entering a hostile environment
• Working in cold storage
• Inspecting sewer pipe
• Reality capture scans on a construction site

Step 2 – Determine the Cost of the Problem

Depending on your role, you may not have access to some metrics, but often you have co-workers in other departments trying to solve the challenges you documented in step 1 and their KPIs may be tied to them, so they’ll gladly help you.

Talk with HR, Health & Safety, Risk Management, Operations, and Accounting about:

• Injuries
• Employee Turnover
• Recruiting Challenges
• Equipment Downtime
• Personnel Downtime

Those cross-department conversations can provide you with great metrics that you can measure success with and determine your ROI (Return On Investment).

Usually, operational efficiency makes it easy to determine an ROI, but it can be difficult when discussing risk mitigation. How do you quantify reducing injuries and preventing death?

For injuries, you look at medical bills, lost time, health insurance costs, cost of handling the case, OSHA fines, etc.

Although each person’s life is priceless to their family, friends, and community, there are business ramifications and cost associated with it whether you’re in manufacturing, construction, or law enforcement for survivor benefits or line of duty benefits.

Step 3 – Create the Business Case

Document your thoughts, findings, and metrics into a concise 1–2-page document. Include supporting evidence like pictures, third-party research, and other materials in the Appendix to keep your business case concise.

5 Parts of Your Business Case

• Challenge – 2-3 sentences about the business challenge you are trying to solve.
• Impact – describe how this challenge impacts your business, sharing both direct and indirect impacts and metrics. Share a vision of what success looks like and include what happens if no action is taken, which is especially important for growing companies.
• Potential Solutions – list various ways you can solve this issue including non-technical solutions.
• Recommendations – provide your recommended course of action.
• ROI – show the positive impact of implementing your recommended solution.

Simple Business Case for a Manufacturing Client

• Challenge
  • We inspect all machinery quarterly and the main assembly line must be turned off for 4-8 hours to safely inspect underneath and behind the equipment.
• Impact
  • Each hour the main assembly line is off costs the company $250,000 totaling $4-8 million annually.
• Potential Solutions  
  • A) Lessen the frequency of inspections, but that could cause large delays in the future if areas of concern are not addressed timely and the problem becomes major.B) Keep the main assembly line operating during inspection. Large safety concern makes this option not feasible.C) Elevate the main assembly line 8’ to allow for easier inspection underneath. Rough estimates exceed $5 million.
  • D) Purchase a confined space inspection robot that fits under and behind the machine. Estimates range from $4,000-20,000 depending on features such as autonomous, watertight, size, etc.
• Recommendations
  • D) Purchase a confined space inspection robot from SuperDroid Robots to expedite the inspection time since a person isn’t crawling on the floor. An onboard camera records HD video providing documentation of inspection (which we don’t currently have).
    Based on clearance, we could also inspect the assembly line monthly while still running to look for other signs of wear or components out of alignment.
• ROI
  • Direct – Reduce inspection from 4-8 hours to 1-2 hours saving $3-6 million annually for <$20,000 robot.
  • Indirect – Document inspections moving forward and can inspect more frequently without impacting productivity.

Measuring Success

The above example of the manufacturing company saving $3-6 million is actually from one of our customers and is obviously a no-brainer. Other business cases need different ways to measure success.

Determine what KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you’ll use to measure success such as equipment uptime, number of injuries, employee retention/recruiting, etc.