How to choose your first automation project
Practical criteria for choosing a task, estimating labor costs and accepting the result.
A good first task is repeatable and has a clear result.
Start with one operation that your employees regularly perform the same way: transferring specification lines, selecting tenders, preparing a company profile or passing on a request. The clearer the input data and the result, the easier it is to verify the benefit.
Calculate the baseline labor costs
How many people perform the operation, how many minutes does one repetition take, and how many repetitions occur per month? Account separately for the time spent checking the result: it often remains even after automation.
Include more than development in the cost
The solution may require infrastructure, access to a model, licenses, support and employee time for implementation. Saved working hours cannot automatically be counted as a reduction in costs: what matters is how the company uses the freed-up time.
Agree on acceptance
Collect typical examples, difficult cases and deliberately incomplete documents. Define in advance the acceptable errors, the manual review queue and the actions to take when an external system is unavailable.
Expand after verification
Once the first scenario works, add new formats, sources or departments. This helps keep the project manageable.
How much time does routine work take?
Calculation example: the fields contain sample values. Enter your own — for example, how many estimators select unit rates manually and how many times per month.
The operation currently takes: 40 h per month.
Calculation: employees × minutes ÷ 60 × operations × share of automation. This is an estimate of working time based on your data, not a promise of results. Time for checking the results, implementation and support is not included.
The calculator shows modeled labor costs in hours based on your data. It does not account for the time needed to check the result, implement or maintain the solution. Use it as a starting point for discussion, not as a promise of results.
We'll show you the product.
We'll work through your task.
Tell us what you want to implement. You can start with a product name or a single example from your work.