If You Can't Say What It Costs Today, You Can't Prove It Worked

Three numbers, measured rather than estimated

Volume, in transactions per month. Touch time, in minutes per transaction, timed with a stopwatch by the people doing the work. Error and rework rate. Add cycle time for anything customer-facing.

Estimates run 40–60% wrong in both directions. People overstate the time of tasks they dislike and understate tasks they perform on autopilot. A five-day tally sheet across five people costs nothing and settles it.

For revenue-touching processes, baseline the leak

The percentage of inbound enquiries with no response inside twenty-four hours, and the percentage never entered into a system at all. This is usually the single largest number in the whole exercise.

Write the baseline down with a date before any vendor or internal team starts scoping. After the build, everyone's memory of how bad it was adjusts conveniently.

Why finance stops funding automation

A post-hoc claim of "we saved about 30%" gets discounted to zero, correctly, and the credibility cost lands on the next request.

Set the target at the same time as the baseline: what number, by when, would make this a success — and what number would make it a failure worth killing.