The automation ROI myth, and what actually pays back

Every operator I meet has a slide deck from some consultant claiming their team will save 400 hours a year. Most of the time that number is arithmetic fiction — hours that would never have been billed, meetings that would never have been booked, work that would never have been done. Real automation ROI is narrower and harsher.

The three questions that separate real ROI from theatre

• Is the work being automated currently being done by a person who is your bottleneck? If no, you are not freeing capacity, you are making the already-idle faster.
• Does the automation remove a decision, or does it just speed up data entry? Removed decisions compound; faster data entry saturates at maybe 20 percent of theoretical savings.
• If it breaks for a week, does anyone notice? If the answer is no, you automated a museum.

The test before you buy

Write down the three highest-value hours your top performer spends in a typical week. If your candidate automation does not touch those three hours directly, the ROI is theatre. Shelve it. The gains from automating a bottleneck person for five hours a week dwarf automating ten non-bottlenecks for fifty.

Automation ROI is measured by what gets un-queued, not by what gets done faster.

The operators who grow stop confusing activity with throughput. You want fewer automations, pointed at sharper targets, each paying for itself in weeks not quarters.