The Real ROI of Business Process Automation
How to calculate payback on workflow automation projects, with a framework we use in every client engagement.
How to calculate payback on workflow automation projects, with a framework we use in every client engagement.
The framework
We score every automation candidate on four axes: frequency (how often does this happen?), cycle cost (person-time + tooling per run), cycle risk (what happens when a human skips a step?), and variability (is the input well-structured?). Anything scoring top-quartile on three of four gets budget.
Costs people forget
Build cost is the obvious one. Harder to estimate: maintenance, eval/monitoring, the cost of false negatives slipping through, and the human time needed to supervise the automation in its first quarter. Budget 25% of build cost per year for live maintenance.
What a real payback looks like
On six recent automation projects across legal, finance, and ops, the median payback was 11 months. The fastest was 4 months (high-frequency, low-variability document classification). The slowest was 22 months (a bespoke exception handler that saved very real money but only triggered once a week).
When automation is not worth it
If the workflow runs less than once a week, is highly variable, and does not carry regulatory or financial risk — do not automate it. Pay someone to do it. Not everything benefits from being a system.