Learning goal
After this lesson you can describe a manual task so that the benefit of automating it can be calculated net of operating costs – and you can spot when exceptions eat up the benefit, before you invest time in a tool.
Define the task
“Automate our quote creation” is not a task but an area. A task has a defined start (input), a defined end (output) and few steps in between. “Generate a quote draft with line items from the price list from the completed requirements form” is a task.
Define it with four questions: What comes in? What goes out? What steps lie in between? Which of them require judgment? Judgment steps stay with a person – at least on the first pass.
Benefit net of operating costs
Gross benefit is the freed-up time multiplied by a calculated hourly value. From that, subtract ongoing operating costs: licenses, maintenance, people's review time, rework on errors. What remains is the net benefit. The one-time setup is amortized through this net benefit, if it is positive.
An example
A retail company processes 100 order confirmations a month manually; each takes 20 minutes. After automation with human review, each would still take 5 minutes. The calculated hourly value is €50, monthly operating costs are €100, and the one-time setup is €2,300.
Calculation: (20 − 5) minutes × 100 cases = 1,500 minutes = 25 hours of capacity per month. Imputed gross benefit 25 × €50 = €1,250. Net benefit €1,250 − €100 = €1,150 per month. Payback €2,300 ÷ €1,150 = 2 months. So far it looks good. Then the question about exceptions: if 30 of the 100 confirmations contain special terms the agent doesn’t handle cleanly, and each costs 15 minutes of rework, 7.5 hours of the benefit disappear again. The calculation stays positive – but only if you counted the exceptions beforehand.
Normal cases and exceptions
Before any decision, count a sample of 20 to 30 real cases and sort them: normal case (rule applies without adjustment), exception (rule applies with adjustment), special case (rule doesn’t apply). The normal case gets automated. The exception gets a check. The special case stays manual – and is not counted in the benefit.
Exercise
- 01Choose a recurring task and describe input, output and steps in five lines.
- 02Count the volume per month and measure (don’t estimate) the minutes per case on three examples.
- 03Sort 20 cases into normal, exception and special cases.
- 04Estimate the minutes after automation, operating costs and setup effort. Use the automation calculator to work out the net benefit and payback.
- 05Calculate once without and once with rework for exceptions.
Reflection aid
- Is your net benefit still positive once exception rework is included? If not, the task isn’t ready – or it’s scoped wrong.
- Did you label the hourly rate “imputed”? It is an assumption, not a booking.
- Is there a person who takes over the review, and did you count their time?
The last lesson closes the circle: How do you measure whether a change actually worked, without talking yourself into causality?
