The Business Process Automation ROI Playbook
How to pick automation candidates, baseline honestly, and measure savings your CFO will accept.
NexusNao TeamStrategy
Pick processes, not tools
Automation programmes fail when they start from a tool looking for a use. Start instead from a ranked list of processes scored on volume, manual effort, error cost and rule-clarity.
The best first candidates share a shape: high volume, mostly rule-based, painful errors, and a human currently ferrying data between systems.
Baseline before you build
Measure the current state while it still exists: items per week, minutes per item, error rate, rework cost, cycle time. Two weeks of honest measurement makes every later ROI claim defensible.
Include the hidden costs — the checking, the chasing, the month-end corrections. That's often where the real savings live.
Design the exception path first
No process automates 100%. The systems that succeed route exceptions to humans with full context and make resolution effortless. The automated share then grows safely over time, with every resolved exception teaching the system.
A process that automates 70% with a great exception path beats one that claims 95% and silently mishandles the rest.
Report against the baseline, forever
Cycle time, error rate, cost per item, hours returned — reported monthly against the pre-automation baseline. When savings are visible and auditable, the next automation funds itself.