Overview
The Automation calculator identifies and ranks activities by their automation potential, helping you prioritize which manual tasks would benefit most from automation initiatives. This calculator analyzes activity frequency and cost to calculate an automation score for each activity, making it easy to focus your RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and automation investments on high-value opportunities.
Common Uses
- Identify high-value automation opportunities across your process
- Prioritize RPA initiatives based on cost savings potential
- Build business cases for automation investments with quantified savings
- Discover repetitive manual tasks suitable for automation
- Track automation opportunities over time to measure initiative effectiveness
- Focus automation efforts on activities with highest return on investment
Settings
This calculator requires no configuration settings. It automatically analyzes all activities in your current filtered data and calculates automation scores based on frequency and cost information.
Optional Enhancement: For cost-weighted automation scoring, configure estimated costs for each activity in your process. Without cost data, the calculator uses frequency-based scoring to identify repetitive activities.
Examples
Example 1: Discovering Top Automation Opportunities
Scenario: You want to identify which activities in your invoice processing workflow would benefit most from automation to reduce manual effort and costs.
Settings:
- No settings required (calculator runs automatically)
Output:
The calculator displays a ranked table of all activities:
| Activity | Automation Score | Activity Count | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual Data Entry | 37.50 | 3,000 | $45,000 |
| Document Review | 28.75 | 2,300 | $34,500 |
| Exception Handling | 22.40 | 1,400 | $21,000 |
| Approval Routing | 18.20 | 1,820 | $18,200 |
| Data Validation | 15.60 | 2,600 | $13,000 |
Insights: Manual Data Entry has the highest automation score (37.50), indicating it occurs frequently and has high cost. With 3,000 executions costing $45,000 total, automating this activity could save approximately $36,000 annually (assuming 80% reduction). This makes it the top priority for your RPA initiative.
Document Review is the second-highest opportunity with $34,500 in total costs. Together, these two activities represent $79,500 in potential savings, making a strong business case for automation investment.
Example 2: Department-Specific Automation Planning
Scenario: Your organization wants to identify automation opportunities specifically within the Accounts Payable department to improve their efficiency.
Step 1 - Filter to Department:
Create a "Cases with Attribute" filter:
- Attribute: Department
- Value: Accounts Payable
Step 2 - Run Automation Calculator:
Add the Automation calculator to your analysis.
Output:
| Activity | Automation Score | Activity Count | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Match PO to Invoice | 42.30 | 4,500 | $67,500 |
| Vendor Validation | 31.20 | 3,900 | $39,000 |
| Payment Processing | 24.50 | 2,450 | $36,750 |
| GL Coding | 19.80 | 3,300 | $26,400 |
Insights: The Accounts Payable department's top automation opportunity is Match PO to Invoice, which occurs 4,500 times with a total cost of $67,500. This three-way matching process is highly repetitive and rule-based, making it an excellent candidate for RPA.
By focusing on the top three activities, the department could potentially automate processes costing $143,250 annually, likely achieving 70-90% reduction in manual effort. This targeted analysis helps build a department-specific automation roadmap.
Example 3: Tracking Automation Initiative Success
Scenario: Six months ago you automated your top three manual activities. Now you want to measure the effectiveness of your automation initiative.
Step 1 - Before Automation (6 months ago):
Original Automation calculator results showed:
- Manual Invoice Entry: 5,200 occurrences, $78,000 total cost
- Document Classification: 3,800 occurrences, $45,600 total cost
- Data Extraction: 4,100 occurrences, $41,000 total cost
Step 2 - After Automation (current):
Run the Automation calculator on recent data:
| Activity | Automation Score | Activity Count | Total Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exception Handling | 28.50 | 1,900 | $28,500 |
| Complex Approvals | 22.10 | 1,470 | $22,050 |
| Manual Invoice Entry | 4.20 | 350 | $5,250 |
Insights: The automation initiative was highly successful. Manual Invoice Entry dropped from 5,200 occurrences to just 350 (a 93% reduction), and from $78,000 to $5,250 (a 93% cost reduction). The activity that was previously your top automation opportunity has moved down to third place, now handling only exceptions.
Document Classification and Data Extraction no longer appear in the top activities, indicating near-complete automation. Your focus can now shift to Exception Handling and Complex Approvals as the next automation priorities. The initiative delivered approximately $156,000 in annualized savings from these three activities alone.
Example 4: Building an Automation Business Case
Scenario: Your CFO requests a data-driven business case for a proposed $150,000 RPA platform investment. You need to quantify the potential return on investment.
Settings:
- No settings required
Analysis Workflow:
- Run the Automation calculator on your full process dataset
- Review the top 10 activities by Automation Score
- Assess technical feasibility for each activity
- Calculate ROI based on Total Cost
Output:
Top 5 technically feasible automation candidates:
| Activity | Total Cost | Automation Potential |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice Data Entry | $125,000 | 90% automatable |
| PO Matching | $89,000 | 85% automatable |
| Vendor Lookup | $67,500 | 95% automatable |
| GL Code Assignment | $54,000 | 80% automatable |
| Payment Scheduling | $42,000 | 75% automatable |
Business Case Calculation:
- Total annual cost of top 5 activities: $377,500
- Average automation reduction: 85%
- Annual savings potential: $320,875
- RPA platform investment: $150,000
- Payback period: 5.6 months
- 3-year ROI: 541%
Insights: The Automation calculator identified $377,500 in annual costs from just five high-priority activities. With an average 85% automation rate, you can achieve $320,875 in annual savings. This provides a compelling business case showing payback in under 6 months and over 5x return in 3 years.
The calculator's Total Cost column makes it easy to quantify savings potential, turning automation from a technical initiative into a strategic business investment with measurable financial impact.
Output
The calculator produces a ranked table with the following columns:
Activity: The name of each activity in your process.
Automation Score: A calculated score representing automation potential. Higher scores indicate better automation candidates. When activity cost data is configured, the score represents the average cost impact per case. Without cost data, it represents the average frequency per case.
Activity Count: The total number of times this activity occurs in your filtered dataset.
Total Cost: The cumulative cost of all executions of this activity. This value is calculated only when you have configured estimated costs for activities in your process metadata. Use this column to quantify potential savings from automation.
The table is automatically sorted by Automation Score (highest first), making your top automation opportunities immediately visible. Activities at the top of the list offer the best combination of frequency and cost, representing your highest-value automation targets.
Pro Tip: Focus on the top 10-20 activities for action planning. Combine Automation Score with Activity Count to balance high-impact opportunities (high score) with implementation complexity (high count may indicate more edge cases to handle).
This documentation is part of the mindzie Studio process mining platform.