Measuring the ROI of End-to-End Workflow Orchestration

There’s a tremendous value to be unlocked when organizations truly streamline their processes. Yet as they become increasingly digitized, the disparate, unconnected workflows and systems in place can keep organizations from achieving their potential.

A recent report from Gartner identifies part of the problem, nearly half of employees struggle to find the information they need to effectively perform their jobs. Organizations can invest in top-tier talent, high-end hardware, and all the other trappings of success yet if the people who make the work can’t do their jobs, revenue suffers.

Aligning employees with the information and systems they need requires an end-to-end workflow orchestration. Instead of keeping valuable insights in data silos, leaders can leverage the Put It Forward orchestration platform to automate the processes, bringing new insights and opportunities that can make an organization future-ready.

The Benefits of Workflow Orchestration 

The manual workflows organizations put in place to get things done end up becoming business-as-usual over time. This is despite the fact that automation can improve processes of virtually any complexity, reducing the number of human errors while accelerating the execution of tasks.

This evolution in automation is what enables collaboration across departments. Employees no longer struggle to find information thanks to the end-to-end connection across the organization, saving time and money in the process.

Meanwhile, employees within departments benefit in key ways as well:

• Marketing: Data orchestration tools drive efficiency in lead scoring, email campaign personalization, and data enrichment. This added level of efficiency allows marketers to better demonstrate their Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), which has historically been difficult to prove.
• Sales: Process orchestration helps identify high-value prospects and happy customers by integrating data across the organization. Sales organizations can forecast more accurately as a result, which helps GTM teams build a more predictable revenue engine.
• Customer Success: Process orchestration helps identify which customers are prime for expansion based on mining intent signals, as well as which customers might be considered “churn flight.” By evaluating customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores, quarterly business review data, and more, customer success teams drive better outcomes for both the user and the organization.
• Support: With access to the right data, support teams become more productive, leading to better outcomes for customers and internal teams alike. There’s less delay in getting the right results to the right people and a much greater morale boost for a team that can accomplish the most important tasks in less time with better results. A happy customer leads to long-term revenue growth.

Why Invest In Workflow Orchestration

Automating the flow of information in an organization isn’t just a matter of productivity. Employee satisfaction can rise considerably when communications improve thanks to cross-collaboration. This reduces employee churn for organizations, heightening the cost savings enabled by increased workflow efficiency.

Those cost realizations are even more appealing when leaders begin analyzing business processes. This is where new revenue streams, data sources, and business ideas become much clearer, all thanks to the power of end-to-end workflow orchestration.

Implementing these advancements not only makes an organization future-ready but also enables new evolutions essential to remaining ahead. This return on investment isn’t theoretical—leaders can calculate the revenue potential of workflow orchestration for themselves.

How to Calculate the ROI of Orchestration

Tech leaders have seen how an appealing innovation may not necessarily lead to improved efficiency. As a result, the concept of Value Stream Investments has emerged to help ensure decision-makers get real value from their investments. This goes both ways as organizations also need to stay aware of the cost of implementation.

Understanding the cost impact of manual processes is the first step in calculating workflow orchestration’s ROI. For any workflow, the time it takes to complete a specific process can be multiplied by the employee’s salary, then multiplied again by the number of times that process is performed. When considered over a 12-month span, this number gives a good estimate of the process’ total cost.

With an automation benchmark in place, this same formula highlights the cost of the upgraded business process. This number will be significantly lower than the manual number thanks to reduced human work hours and increased efficiency.

With both figures calculated, it’s simply a matter of subtracting the annual automated workflow cost from the annual manual workflow number. Divide these savings by the cost of the automation software and implementation, then multiply by 100 for a percentage.

As an example, let’s use vacation approval requests that go directly to an HR manager. The manager may spend 10 hours per month handling these requests, reviewing each one as it arises, requesting more information if needed, and finally approving or disallowing the request. At $50 per hour, this process costs $500/month or $6000 per year.

If automation halves the time spent on the process, the HR manager now only spends five hours per month on approvals, reviewing the work automation produces. At $250/month, the approval process has been reduced to a $3000 per year cost. Dividing that number into the total cost of the automation software’s implementation provides a final ROI percentage.

Greater Cost Savings With Put It Forward

The cost savings won by organizations through this automation approach happen across departments and at different levels. Specifically, leaders can anticipate key savings in:

• Infrastructure. Rather than needlessly spending on additional hardware, organizations leverage current technology to its fullest with automation. Software needs are reduced thanks to the streamlining of existing processes while the networking infrastructure required to manage these processes, data, and tasks is empowered through AI.
• Development. Comparing the cost of development tools, plus the developers’ time, against the efficiency of automation highlights just how much leaders can save. Additional time savings happen when users are able to analyze, redesign, and automate the process or processes in question, saving developers even more time that can be reinvested elsewhere.
• Maintenance. Paying employees to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot business processes adds up over time. Compare this number to the time spent maintaining new automation built with Put It Forward’s technology to see just how much organizations save compared to the fully loaded cost of in-house automation.

Key Takeaways

Organization leaders must use an ROI-focused approach to adding technological innovation within their departments. Measuring this ROI depends not only on the productivity improvements made but also on the cost and effectiveness of the implementation.

These metrics can be quantified to ensure a positive impact on your organization’s bottom line. With Put It Forward, organizations have access to best-in-class workflow orchestration tools that streamline workflows and reduce complexity with no code. Schedule a demo today to implement effective orchestration across your organization.

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