BUSINESS

Process Automation: How to Start & Measure ROI?

Jan 26, 2026

Has your company already reached the limits of manual optimization, while the pressure for results and scalability continues to grow? Business Process Automation (BPA) is the strategic answer that allows you to move from the question "how to do something better?" to "how to make tasks perform themselves, flawlessly and instantly?". In this comprehensive guide, you will learn where to start with automation in your company, how to identify processes with the greatest potential, and how to precisely calculate the return on investment (ROI). Discover how to transform repetitive operations into a powerful lever for growth and a competitive advantage.

Introduction

1. What is business process automation (BPA) and why is it crucial for a chief operating officer?
2. Where to start with automation in a company? Audit and prioritization
3. Examples of high-ROI automation in key company departments
4. Process automation and return on investment (ROI): How to measure success?
5. Automation tools: A review of strategic options

Summary

Introduction

In a dynamic business environment, where pressure for results, operational efficiency, and scalability grows with each quarter, chief operating and product officers face the challenge of continuous optimization. However, traditional process optimization, which involves manually improving existing workflows, is reaching its limits. This is where business process automation (BPA) enters the stage, no longer just a technological novelty, but a strategic necessity. It represents a fundamental paradigm shift – moving from the question "how can we do this better?" to "how can we make this happen on its own, flawlessly and instantly?".

This article was created for leaders who understand that the future of their organization depends on its ability to undergo digital transformation. We will delve into what automation is, how to distinguish it from classic optimization, and above all – how to implement it in a thoughtful, measurable way that guarantees a high return on investment. We will focus on concrete steps, real-life examples, and a strategic approach that will allow you to transform automation in your company into a powerful lever for growth and a competitive advantage.

What is business process automation (BPA) and why is it crucial for a chief operating officer?

When defining what business process automation is, we go far beyond simple scripts or macros. BPA is the strategic use of technology to manage, execute, and orchestrate multi-step business processes that previously required human intervention. We are talking about complex workflows that often involve multiple departments, systems, and decision points. For a chief operating or product officer, BPA is not an end in itself, but a tool for achieving fundamental business goals: maximizing efficiency, reducing operational costs, minimizing the risk of human error, and increasing the organization's scalability.

In practice, automation in a company translates into the ability to react faster to market changes, better utilize human resources (by relieving employees of repetitive, tedious tasks and redirecting them to creative and strategic activities), and – crucially – build data-driven operations. Automated processes generate clean, structured data in real time, which is an invaluable source of information for further analysis and making better decisions. It is a transformation from a reactive, fire-fighting model to a proactive one, where systems autonomously manage routine operations, allowing leaders to focus on strategy and innovation.

Process optimization vs. automation: Key differences

Many managers use the terms process optimization and automation interchangeably, which is a fundamental strategic mistake. Understanding the difference is key to properly planning transformation initiatives.

Process optimization is an analytical and conceptual activity. It involves a thorough analysis of the existing workflow (As-Is), identifying bottlenecks, redundant steps, redundancies, and delays, and then designing a new, improved process (To-Be). The result of optimization is a better plan of action, which can still be executed manually by employees. The goal is to find a more efficient path, but the executor is still a human. Example: changing the order of steps in the invoice approval process to avoid waiting for one person's signature.

Business process automation is an executive and technological activity. It involves implementing software or systems that execute tasks within a process without human involvement. Automation can be applied to an optimized process, but also to an existing one (although the best results come from combining both). The goal is to eliminate the need for manual work. Example: implementing an OCR system that automatically reads data from an invoice, verifies it against the order in the ERP system, and directs it for payment if all rules are met.

In summary, optimization is redesigning the map, and automation is building an autonomous vehicle that travels on that map. For a chief operating officer, this means you cannot rely on just one. Without optimization, we risk automating a bad or inefficient process. Without automation, even the best-optimized process is still prone to human error, limited by employee "throughput", and difficult to scale.

Where to start with automation in a company? Audit and prioritization

Starting an automation journey without a solid plan is the easiest way to burn through your budget and frustrate your team. The key question, where to start with automation in a company, requires a methodical approach that can be summarized in two fundamental steps: audit and prioritization. This is the stage where managerial intuition must be supported by hard data and objective analysis.

Step 1: Process identification and mapping

The first step is to create a comprehensive map of the processes within the organization. The goal is not a superficial listing of tasks, but a deep understanding of how work is actually performed. It is essential to involve "process owners" and the employees who perform these tasks daily – they possess invaluable, often undocumented, knowledge.

Methods for identification and mapping:

Process workshops: Gather representatives from different departments involved in a given process (e.g., from sales, through fulfillment, to invoicing) and, together, step-by-step, draw out the flow on a whiteboard or in a dedicated tool (e.g., using BPMN).

Individual interviews: Talk to key employees to understand the nuances, exceptions, and "workarounds" they use in their daily work.

Documentation analysis: Review existing procedures, instructions, and regulations, comparing them with reality.

Process Mining: Use specialized software that analyzes system logs (from ERP, CRM, etc.) and automatically reconstructs the actual process flow, highlighting deviations, delays, and bottlenecks.

The result of this stage should be a detailed process map, including: all steps, decision points, people and systems involved, the duration of individual stages, and volume (e.g., number of invoices per month, number of new employees to onboard per year).

Step 2: Which processes in the company are worth automating? Selection criteria

With a process map in hand, we face the choice of candidates for automation. Not every process is suitable for it in the first instance. To make a strategic choice, each identified process should be evaluated against the following criteria:

Key criteria for qualifying a process for automation:

Repetitiveness and high volume: The more frequently a process is performed and the more transactions it handles, the greater the potential for time and cost savings. A process performed once a month is likely not a good candidate to start with.

Rule-based: The ideal process for automation is logical and based on predefined rules (e.g., "IF the invoice amount is below X AND it is linked to a purchase order, THEN approve automatically"). Processes requiring subjective judgment, creativity, or empathy are much harder to automate.

Prone to human error: Monotonous tasks involving data entry between systems (e.g., from Excel to CRM) are a natural source of costly mistakes. Automation eliminates this risk.

Stability: The process should be mature and relatively stable. Automating a process that undergoes fundamental changes every month will be inefficient and costly to maintain.

Involvement of multiple systems: Processes that require an employee to log into several different applications (e.g., CRM, ERP, email platform, spreadsheet) to copy and paste data are ideal candidates. A software robot can do this much faster and without errors.

Measurability and impact on KPIs: Choose processes whose improvement has a direct, measurable impact on key performance indicators (KPIs), such as customer handling time, document processing cost, or month-end closing time.

For prioritization, it is useful to use a simple matrix, evaluating each process in two dimensions: Potential Business Impact (ROI) vs. Implementation Complexity. To begin, select processes from the "High Impact, Low Complexity" quadrant. These are the so-called "quick wins" that will help prove the value of automation, build enthusiasm within the organization, and secure budget for subsequent, more ambitious projects.

Examples of high-ROI automation in key company departments

Theory is important, but it's the concrete applications that best illustrate the power of automation. By analyzing examples of high-ROI automation, one can see repeatable patterns that can be successfully adapted in almost any medium or large organization. Let's focus on areas where the return on investment is the fastest and most tangible.

Marketing and sales automation: Accelerating the sales cycle

Marketing and sales departments operate on a huge amount of data and interactions, making them an ideal field for implementation. Marketing and sales automation aims not only to save time but, above all, to increase conversion and shorten the sales cycle through personalization and rapid response.

Process: Lead Management.

Manual problem: A salesperson receives leads from various sources (website form, trade show, webinar). They must manually assess their quality, enter them into the CRM, and then decide who to contact first. The process is slow, subjective, and leads to "losing" potential customers.

Automated solution: A marketing automation system automatically collects leads from all sources. Then, based on predefined rules (lead scoring, e.g., for industry, company size, pages visited), it qualifies them and assigns a priority. "Hot" leads (with a high score) are immediately assigned to the appropriate salesperson in the CRM, who receives an automatic notification. "Warm" leads are placed in automated nurturing campaigns (sequences of educational emails) that warm them up until they are ready for a conversation.

ROI: Significant reduction in response time to inquiries (from hours to minutes), increased lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, better use of salespeople's time (they focus on conversations, not administration), measurability of the effectiveness of individual marketing channels.

Read the sales automation guide to delve deeper into this topic:
CRM Implementation for Sales: A Complete Guide

Finance and accounting: Reducing costs and errors

The finance department is a kingdom of processes based on documents, rules, and deadlines. This is an area where business process automation brings some of the most spectacular savings.

Process: Accounts Payable.

Manual problem: An invoice in PDF or paper form arrives at the company. An employee must manually read the data (supplier, invoice number, net/gross amounts, line items), enter it into the ERP system, and then manually send an email to the person responsible for content approval. After approval, the invoice returns to accounting for final approval and posting. The process is slow, labor-intensive, and generates numerous errors (typos, incorrect amounts).

Automated solution: An RPA robot monitors a dedicated email inbox. Upon receiving an invoice, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology automatically extracts all necessary data from it. The system verifies the data's correctness (e.g., supplier's tax ID in the database) and then checks if there is a corresponding purchase order (PO) for the invoice in the ERP system. If the amounts match (so-called 3-way matching: invoice-order-delivery), the invoice is automatically routed for payment. If approval is required, the system automatically sends a task to the appropriate person in the workflow system.

ROI: Reduction in the cost of processing a single invoice by 60-80%, shortening of processing time from days to minutes, elimination of manual errors, timely payments (possibility to negotiate early payment discounts), full process auditability.

HR and Operations: Increasing the efficiency of onboarding and data management

Managing the employee lifecycle is a process involving many departments – HR, IT, administration, the direct supervisor. Its automation significantly improves the new employee experience and unburdens the HR department.

Process: New employee onboarding.

Manual problem: After the contract is signed, the HR department must manually send a series of emails: to IT requesting account creation and equipment preparation, to administration to prepare the workspace, to the supervisor with information about the new team member. Each step creates a risk of delay or omission, resulting in a chaotic first day of work.

Automated solution: After entering the new employee's data into the HR system, an automated workflow is triggered. The system automatically creates a ticket in the IT Service Management system (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow) with the task of preparing equipment and accounts. Simultaneously, it sends a task to the administration department, blocks welcome meetings in the supervisor's calendar, and enrolls the employee in mandatory training. A few days before starting, the new employee receives an automatic welcome email with the agenda for the first day.

ROI: Guarantee that the workstation and access are ready on the first day, significant relief for the HR department from coordination tasks, a positive first impression and higher engagement from the new employee, standardization and full control over the process.

Process automation and return on investment (ROI): How to measure success?

For any chief operating officer, justifying expenses with hard data is crucial. An automation initiative must have a clearly defined business case. Therefore, the question of process automation and return on investment (ROI) is absolutely fundamental. Successfully measuring the success of an automation project goes beyond simple FTE savings and includes a broad spectrum of benefits, both financial and operational.

Learn how to accurately measure the effectiveness and ROI of a system after implementation:
Post-Implementation KPIs: How to Measure Success?

Components of ROI calculation

The ROI calculation for an automation project should be treated like any other investment analysis. The basic formula is:

ROI (%) = [(Benefits of automation - Cost of investment) / Cost of investment] * 100%

To apply it correctly, you need to precisely define its components:

1. Benefits of automation (Gains):

Reduced labor costs: This is the most obvious element. You need to calculate how many hours of manual work will be saved thanks to automation and multiply it by the average hourly cost of an employee (including social security, benefits, etc.). For example, if automating the invoicing process saves 80 hours of work per month in a team where the average hourly cost is €12, the annual saving is 80 * 12 * 12 = €11,520.

Avoidance of error costs: Estimate the costs resulting from human errors in a given process. These could be penalties for late payments, complaint costs due to incorrect shipments, or losses resulting from incorrect data in reports.

Increased productivity and throughput: An automated process can handle a much larger volume of transactions without the need to hire new people. Calculate the value of the additional work a robot can perform compared to a human in the same amount of time.

Accelerated revenue generation: If automation shortens the sales cycle or the order-to-cash time, this translates into faster cash flow.

2. Cost of investment:

Software costs: Licenses for the automation platform (e.g., RPA, BPM, iPaaS). These can be annual, monthly, or usage-based fees.

Implementation costs: Remuneration for the implementation company or the internal development team for the analysis, design, development, and testing of the automation.

Maintenance and support costs: Annual fee for maintenance, technical support, and software updates.

Infrastructure costs: Possible costs of servers (virtual or physical) on which the robots will run.

Internal costs: The time of employees involved in the project (workshops, testing, training).

It is best to conduct the ROI analysis over a 3-year period to account for the full investment lifecycle.

Non-financial benefits of automation in the company

Limiting yourself solely to hard financial data would be a mistake, as automation in a company generates a range of strategic benefits that are difficult to monetize directly but have a huge impact on the organization's health.

Increased employee morale and satisfaction: Relieving employees of monotonous, repetitive tasks allows them to focus on more creative and valuable work, which directly affects their engagement and reduces turnover.

Improved data quality: Robots do not make typos and always follow the rules. This guarantees higher quality data in company systems, which in turn leads to better analyses and more accurate business decisions.

Increased operational scalability: The business can grow without a linear increase in back-office headcount. A software robot can work 24/7/365, and its "processing power" can be easily increased by adding more licenses.

Enhanced compliance and auditability: Every action of a robot is logged and recorded. This provides a complete, transparent audit trail, which is invaluable in regulated industries and during internal or external audits.

Better Customer Experience: Faster handling of inquiries, error-free order fulfillment, and instant answers to simple questions (thanks to chatbots) significantly increase customer satisfaction.

When presenting the business case to management, both perspectives should be included – the hard financial ROI and the strategic non-financial benefits that build long-term value and organizational resilience.

Automation tools: A review of strategic options

Choosing the right technology is as important as choosing the right process. The market offers a wide range of automation tools, and the task of the chief operating officer is not so much to know specific brands, but to understand the strategic purpose of different tool categories. The choice depends on the specifics of the automated processes, the existing IT architecture, and the company's strategic goals.

See a comparison of the most popular tools for operational process automation:
Process Automation: A Comprehensive Guide for Business

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is a technology that uses "software robots" to mimic human actions at the user interface (GUI) level. A robot can click buttons, fill out forms, log into applications, and copy and paste data – just as an employee would.

Strategic use: RPA is ideal for automating processes in an environment with legacy systems that lack an available API. It is a "non-invasive" technology that allows applications to be integrated without costly changes to their source code. It works great for tasks involving data migration between systems.

Examples: Automatically extracting data from PDF invoices and entering it into an accounting system; cyclically generating reports by logging into multiple systems and aggregating data in Excel; mass updating of customer data in a CRM based on an input file.

Business Process Management (BPM)

BPM systems are comprehensive platforms for modeling, implementing, monitoring, and optimizing complex business processes from end to end. Unlike RPA, which focuses on automating individual tasks, BPM concentrates on orchestrating the entire workflow, which often involves both people and systems.

Strategic use: BPM is the best choice for long, complex, and business-critical processes that require human decision points and interactions. These platforms offer graphical process modeling (e.g., in BPMN notation), task management for people (task lists), and advanced capabilities for integration with other systems via API.

Examples: The credit application process (from submission by the customer, through risk analysis, to decision and disbursement of funds); the complaint handling process (from reporting, through technical analysis, to decision and communication with the customer); the new product launch process.

Low-code/No-code and integration platforms (iPaaS)

This category of tools democratizes automation, allowing people without programming skills (business analysts, operations staff) to create simpler workflows. iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) platforms specialize in connecting different cloud applications (SaaS) with each other.

Strategic use: These tools are ideal for rapid prototyping and automating simpler, linear processes that involve transferring data between modern cloud applications (e.g., Gmail, Slack, Trello, Salesforce, HubSpot). They allow for the instant creation of integrations like "when X happens in application A, do Y in application B".

Examples: Automatically creating a task in Trello after receiving an email with a specific subject in Gmail; automatically sending a notification on a Slack channel when a new lead with a value above a set threshold appears in the CRM; automatically adding a new subscriber from a website form to a mailing list in Mailchimp.

A strategic approach to tool selection often involves a hybrid use of these technologies. RPA can handle the "dirty work" on a legacy system and then pass the data to a BPM system, which manages the subsequent complex workflow, in the meantime using iPaaS connectors to communicate with cloud applications.

Summary

Business process automation is no longer an option but the foundation of a modern, competitive organization. For a chief operating or product officer, it is no longer just an IT issue, but a strategic lever for building lasting efficiency, scalability, and business resilience. As we have shown, the key to success is not the chaotic implementation of trendy technologies, but methodical and thoughtful action. This process begins with a fundamental question: where to start with automation in a company? The answer lies in a thorough audit and prioritization of processes, choosing those that offer the highest potential return on investment at an acceptable level of complexity.

Focusing on measurable benefits, both financial and operational, allows for the construction of a solid business case and gaining management support. The analysis of process automation and return on investment (ROI) must consider not only cost savings but also strategic benefits such as improved data quality, increased employee morale, and enhanced regulatory compliance. The analysis of specific examples of high-ROI automation in departments such as finance, HR, or marketing and sales automation proves that the benefits are real and achievable.

The correct selection of automation tools – whether it's RPA for working with legacy systems, BPM for orchestrating complex workflows, or iPaaS platforms for cloud integration – is the final piece of the puzzle. An investment in automation is an investment in the future. It's about building an organization that is not only more efficient but also more agile, intelligent, and ready for the challenges of tomorrow. It's time to stop asking "if?" and start acting, by planning the first, strategically chosen step on the path to operational transformation.