Return on Automation

We are firm believers in pragmatic use of AI and automation. These technologies are not magical pixie dust—they will not instantly transform your business, nor will they become your perfect digital assistant overnight. What they will do, though, is enable you to dramatically reduce manual effort and improve business outcomes for the right use cases.

Finding the right use case begins with some classic cost/benefit analysis, but we can upgrade the typical cost/benefit analysis experience with the power of AI and automation.

Enter our Automation ROI Calculator. You can try it now in just 5 minutes, and you’ll get to experience some of the great intelligent automation features of Catalytic.

What does it do?

This calculator asks a few simple questions about a business process that you’d like to automate, and then it outputs a PowerPoint slide with roughly reasonable estimates for:

• Automation potential

• Estimated build effort

• Time and cost savings

• ROI and payback period

How does it work?

This calculator uses a number of Catalytic’s intelligent automation features to provide this result:

1. A web form that can be shared publicly enables people to input automation use cases and uses conditions to show or hide fields based on previous answers.
2. To determine the automation opportunities, Catalytic uses fuzzy matching against a data table of different types of automation features to find the features that will most likely be leveraged.
3. To estimate the overall automation potential, we filter the table of fuzzy matches and then average the values in the column.
4. Formulas and basic math calculate the time and cost savings, ROI and payback period.
5. Tasks are assigned to people to validate their inputs when the calculations appear outside the typical range.
6. The values are dynamically inserted into a PowerPoint slide template.
7. The slide is emailed as an attachment to the person who submitted the web form.

If you’re still reading and haven’t tried it yet, go try it!

Beyond the calculator

You might be thinking, “well, this is pretty nice as a quick SWAG, but it’s definitely not detailed enough for making big money decisions for my automation department or to present to my CFO.”

We agree. This should serve as a means to rapidly assess a business process for its automation potential.

For major-effort, high-reward automations, we recommend performing a more in-depth cost/benefit analysis. Catalytic offers a packaged Automation Center of Excellence (COE) solution that provides a framework, toolset and services to not only calculate robust ROI calculations, but also:

• Define automation strategy

• Intake requests for automations from across the business

• Prioritize the pipeline of automation opportunities

• Manage the implementations

• Report on status and value

If you would like to learn more about our Automation COE solution or how Catalytic can help you bring intelligent automation to your organization, contact us!