Buyer’s Guide to Processing Automation: Expansion Strategy 

Over the past few months, we’ve been sharing the lessons we’ve learned from automating Nuix since 2017. Our goal is to help people who have never tackled this problem understand the big considerations to keep in mind when investing in a solution. 

So far, we’ve covered: 

To wrap up, we’ll focus on the real value of automation – the ability to do more and varied work. 

Most teams start their automation journey because they have a backlog of work, or a big new project, or maybe they’ve lost a critical member of their team. So, there’s abit of a catch-up involved, and it’s easy to compare the cost of automation to other operational costs, like a replacement hire, new machines, etc.  

Fast-forward six to nine months, and with the help of automation, these same teams have delivered a 3-5X increase in activity. The backlog is gone, people are going home at a reasonable hour and projects are getting out the door before the deadline.  

In fact, you might have a surplus of capacity – your team might be able to take on even more work without new investments.  

Why would you want to do that? 

For law firms and service providers, it’s an opportunity to win more business and make more money. And, because this new work is using existing resources, the marginal cost goes down, which opens up projects that might otherwise have been unprofitable. Or, it might become feasible to offer a self-service model, which appeals to a different kind of client and project profile and also enhances the services your offering to existing clients.  

For corporations, it’s an opportunity to meaningfully improve internal projects such as building a knowledge management capability by sampling and scanning available data to build data maps, to accelerate response to security events, or to reduce the burden of DSARs. This expansion helps justify budgets and also helps build trust and relationships that might be helpful on that next urgent litigation event.  

These scenarios are where some of the advanced features discussed in Buyers Guide II really come into play. There’s no way to support a self-service model without strong user access controls. Advocating for additional responsibility is a lot easier with real-time business intelligence across all cases. Recurring job scheduling can really help departments consume weekend and off-shift resources without burdening their team. 

However, these scenarios can also be harder to put into a business case. The important thing to remember is that this is surplus capacity – above and beyond the productivity and performance gains in your primary use-case. Hopefully, having this surplus will drive innovation, new relationships, and real progress! 

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