ROQS-Driven Automation Roadmap at an Industrial Equipment Manufacturer — $2M Savings Plan with Quadrant-Prioritised Opportunities
MindMap's proprietary ROQS framework + Automation Assessment + Workflow Automator delivering a USD 2 Mn savings programme across F&A and operations with quadrant-prioritised execution.
The challenge
The client — an industrial-equipment manufacturer with a substantial F&A and operations footprint across multiple verticals — had been pursuing RPA-led automation in a fragmented fashion, with individual business-units identifying and pursuing per-unit automation opportunities without a coherent organisational view. The result was that the per-opportunity selection was being driven by per-unit-leadership-preference rather than by an organisationally-rational prioritisation; the per-opportunity execution was being delivered with variable quality and economics; and the cumulative-portfolio-view of the automation work was structurally invisible to the executive team.
The mechanical symptoms were specific. Some high-cost-saving opportunities were not being pursued because the relevant business-unit leadership had not surfaced them; some lower-cost-saving opportunities were being pursued because they were operationally-convenient for the business-unit. The combined automation-portfolio's ROI was structurally suboptimal; the executive team had no organisational view of the automation-portfolio's progress or its forward-pipeline.
The CIO had aligned on the objective: develop a proprietary framework for the RPA-opportunity qualification-scoring that would identify the cross-organisational opportunities, score them on a common basis, prioritise them through a quadrant-based execution model, and provide the executive team with the organisational portfolio-view that the per-unit-fragmented approach had been structurally unable to deliver.
The approach
MindMap deployed an automation-portfolio engagement composed of the proprietary ROQS framework, the Automation Assessment Framework focused on the manufacturer's F&A and operations footprint, Workflow Automator (Wa) for the execution of the qualified opportunities, and FP&A Forecaster (Ff) for the ongoing portfolio-tracking and ROI-monitoring.
Phase one was the opportunity-identification work. We conducted a structured opportunity-identification engagement across the F&A and operations footprint covering the procure-to-pay processes (AP invoice processing, vendor reconciliation, payments reconciliation), the record-to-report processes (journal entries, allocations, closing-and-reporting), the order-to-cash processes (sales-order-processing, dunning-letters, cash-applications, cash-deductions, invoicing) and the QP-cross-functional processes (claim triaging, annuity disbursement, life-commissions, driver-qualification indexing).
Phase two was the ROQS-scoring work. Each identified opportunity was scored on the ROQS framework dimensions: complexity (the implementation complexity), impact (the operational impact), uniqueness of solution (the differentiation of the RPA solution), fungibility (the utilisation of RPA-code across similar processes), productisation capability (the suitability for productised-deployment) and revenue-generation possibility. The composite ROQS score was used to categorise opportunities into the A, B and C categories.
Phase three was the quadrant-based prioritisation. The opportunities were positioned on a two-dimensional matrix combining the ROQS score (the qualitative qualification) and the net cost-savings projection (the quantitative impact). The matrix produced four quadrants: the Leader's Quadrant (strong business case with high projected cost savings, ROQS > 44 and net cost benefit > $120K), the Dreamer's Quadrant (high projected cost savings but weak ROQS), the Realist's Quadrant (modest savings with strong ROQS) and the Opportunist's Quadrant (low potential opportunities where business case needs improvement).
Phase four was the directional-automation-roadmap. The roadmap sequenced the execution across three time-bands: 3-to-6 months for the highest-priority opportunities (AP invoice processing, reconciliations, system-generated allocations, closing-and-reporting, sales-order-processing, dunning-letters), 6-to-12 months for the next-priority opportunities (payments reconciliation, PO issuance, JE automation, E-filing automation, sales-order-processing extensions, cash-deductions automation), and 12-to-24 months for the longer-term opportunities (vendor reconciliation, system-capitalization, payroll-validation, federal-and-state-liability filing, invoicing-products, customer-master-update).
The pre-built building blocks
Rather than commission a ground-up build, the engagement leaned on MindMap's pre-built accelerator library — production-tested components that compress what would otherwise be a six-to-nine-month build into weeks.
Process Assessment Engine
ROQS framework and Automation Assessment scoring
Workflow Automator
Execution of qualified Leader's Quadrant opportunities
FP&A Forecaster
Portfolio-tracking and ROI-monitoring dashboards
Workflow Planner
Per-opportunity blueprinting-and-deployment workflow
The architecture
The ROQS framework is the structural intellectual-property of the engagement — a proprietary RPA-opportunity-qualification-scoring methodology covering the dimensions of complexity, impact, uniqueness, fungibility, productisation and revenue-generation. The framework's structured scoring approach produces the consistent cross-opportunity comparability that the per-unit-fragmented approach had structurally been unable to deliver.
The Automation Assessment Framework focused on the manufacturer's F&A and operations footprint provides the per-process detailed-assessment with the lean-enabled-automation-analysis pattern. The assessment covers the per-process diagnostics (volume, SUTs, AHT, applications, activities, clicks-per-screen) and the per-process opportunity-identification work.
The ROQS RoI Tracker provides the portfolio-level execution-tracking. The tracker covers the per-opportunity FTE-benefit projection, the per-opportunity net-cost-savings projection (annualised), the per-opportunity implementation-status tracking (opportunity-identified, opportunity-qualified, blueprinting-in-progress, bot-developed-or-implemented), and the per-vertical-and-cross-vertical aggregated benefit-tracking.
The RPA RoI Radar visualisation provides the executive-team-level quadrant-based opportunity-visibility. The radar plots the per-opportunity ROQS score (x-axis) against the net cost-savings projection (y-axis) with the per-opportunity implementation-status colour-coding. The Leader's Quadrant opportunities receive the priority-execution focus.
Workflow Automator handles the execution of the qualified opportunities through the per-opportunity automation-build with the appropriate per-process integration patterns. The execution is sequenced according to the directional-automation-roadmap with the per-opportunity blueprinting-development-and-deployment workflow.
FP&A Insights provides the ongoing portfolio-tracking and ROI-monitoring with the executive-team dashboards. The dashboards visualise the per-opportunity-and-per-vertical execution-status and benefit-realisation.
The numbers behind the story
Approximately $2M of 3-year savings was identified across the automation portfolio through the ROQS-scoring exercise. The identified savings span the F&A vertical (approximately $1.75M projected, with $1.24M from the procure-to-pay-and-record-to-report scope and $512K from the order-to-cash scope) and the QP-cross-functional vertical ($320K projected).
More than 20 opportunities were scored on the ROQS framework with a projected 65+ FTE benefit across the portfolio. The structured scoring exercise produced the consistent cross-opportunity comparability that supported the executive-team's portfolio-level decision-making.
Quadrant-based prioritisation produced clear execution-sequencing. The Leader's Quadrant opportunities (Claims Processing Automation with $400K projected benefit, Vendor Creation/Updation Automation with $297K, Workflow Request Validation with $198K, Auto-Match Invoice Processing with $180K, Payment Reminders and Dunning Letters with $141K) were prioritised for the immediate-execution phase.
The Realist's Quadrant and Opportunist's Quadrant opportunities were sequenced for the subsequent execution phases with the appropriate business-case-improvement work pursued in parallel for the opportunities where the business case needed strengthening.
The directional-automation-roadmap provided the executive team with the 3-to-6 month, 6-to-12 month and 12-to-24 month execution view. The structured roadmap replaced the per-unit-fragmented approach with the cross-organisational portfolio view that the executive team had been pursuing.
An unexpected outcome: the ROQS framework has become the manufacturer's structural approach to all future automation-opportunity qualification work. The framework's per-opportunity scoring discipline now applies to the new opportunities as they surface, ensuring the ongoing portfolio-rationality that the previous fragmented approach had structurally been unable to maintain.
“Our automation portfolio had been fragmented across per-unit-leadership-preference decisioning, with the cumulative portfolio-ROI structurally suboptimal and no organisational view of the work. MindMap's ROQS framework gave us the cross-opportunity comparability we had been missing, identified two-million-dollars of three-year savings across a structured roadmap, and the quadrant-based prioritisation that our executive team can act on with confidence.”— Chief Information Officer· Industrial Equipment Manufacturer
Why MindMap was chosen
The manufacturer had previously evaluated two strategy-consulting firms for the automation-portfolio rationalisation work. Both proposed multi-month strategy-engagements that would have produced framework-recommendations without the embedded execution-capability that the manufacturer's CIO required.
MindMap's combined framework-and-execution-capability approach — bringing the proprietary ROQS framework, the Automation Assessment Framework, Workflow Automator for the execution and FP&A Insights for the portfolio-tracking — was the structural differentiator. The manufacturer received the framework, the prioritisation and the execution-capability through a single engagement rather than through a sequence of strategy-and-execution engagements with different vendors.
Our embedded automation-portfolio-management expertise on the delivery team (two former CIO-organisation automation-leads from peer industrial manufacturers and a former Big-4-strategy-consultant with automation-portfolio depth) was the third factor. The CIO valued the team's ability to engage with the executive team on the framework-and-strategy work while simultaneously executing the high-priority opportunities.
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