Bringing it together Investment and costs Time to value Now you can summarize the return that your Now that you’ve considered the return of a Executives prefer investments that have high ROI organization will see from an investment in a General Automation Platform, now it’s time to and low time to value. Time to value is calculated General Automation Platform. estimate your investment. from the project start date to the point where the project starts to deliver value. Be sure to compare Follow these steps: The product pricing model for GAPs are a function the time to value for the options that you are of the following factors: considering. Depending on the processes that you 1. Measure the baseline metrics of the processes that you seek to improve with the power of • The edition or packing of value-added features are automating you could estimate a wide range automation. required of times to value between one week to several months. 2. Quantify the amount of time that it takes to • Number of workflows accomplish each step in a process. • Volume of data flowing through your workflows 3. Estimate the cost of the resources that are The support and training pricing model for GAPs currently engaged in manual processes. depend on the following: 4. Document if there are any processes that just cannot be accomplished without an automation • Service-level agreements on support availability platform. and turn-around time 5. Calculate any cost savings due to reducing • Amount of training required spending on other software tools. The configuration consulting portion of the costs Now you can drop the results into a simple can vary as follows: spreadsheet and track the “before” and “after” in • Zero cost if you have the time and skills side-by-side columns. necessary to configure the software yourself. • A fixed amount of configuration consulting to get you started. • A customized statement of work that is scoped to your particular needs. Now just add these three cost items into your handy-dandy ROI spreadsheet. 37