It’s tempting to assume that automation is better and more cost effective, but do you have the numbers to truly assess the underlying value of each automation? If you’re using a charge-back model, do you have a means to distribute your costs fairly amongst processes? As a strategist, can you articulate the economies of scale and efficient usage of a shared digital workforce?
Inspiring Automation’s RPA Efficiency and Cost Calculator can help you answer those questions.
The Input Metrics
In order to calculate a simplistic Process Execution Cost and a Usage Efficiency Rating, you are going to need a few basic metrics.
- RPA Licensing Cost – this is the total cost for licensing your RPA software: the bots and any centralized orchestration components.
- Operating Staff Cost – this is the cost associated with your RPA practice, and may consist of COE staff, Process-specific team members, and Support personnel
- Platform Infrastructure Cost (Annual) – these are the annual costs for the Infrastructure used to support your RPA platform instance and processing.
- Total Process Execution Time – this is a summation of the amount of time that is required to complete the process across the measured time period.
This calculator is designed to be a simple start and primarily focuses on operating costs; the costs for development are not factored into this version.
The Output Metrics
Using the above metrics, you can calculate the following:
- Bot Utilization Efficiency Rating – indicates the percentage of your total capacity that you are using
- Process Execution Cost – indicates the true cost to run your automation processes based by distributing costs based on a process’ consumption percentage of total activity
- Optimal Process Execution Cost – indicates the lowest cost to run your automation process if your bots were fully utilized to their potential



