Every automation conversation starts with someone guessing. "It probably takes a couple of hours a week." It is almost never a couple of hours, and the guess is usually low by a factor of three.
Here is the arithmetic we run in the audit week, which you can run yourself before you call anyone.
Count the steps, not the task
At Coastline Logistics the order flow looked like one job. Written out it was fourteen steps across three teams, and the four-hour wait for supplier confirmations was invisible to everyone because nobody was actively working during it.
Write every step on its own line with the person and the duration. The list is always longer than the person doing it expects.
Price the interruption, not just the minutes
A fifteen-minute step that happens eight times a day is not two hours of work. It is eight interruptions, each with a re-focus cost, spread across a day that then holds nothing else.
We do not try to quantify that precisely. We just note that every hours-saved number is a floor, not a ceiling.
Then decide with a number
Coastline's fourteen steps came to 698 hours a month across three people. At their loaded cost that is a number a COO can hold against a build price without a spreadsheet.
Our ROI calculator does the same arithmetic in thirty seconds. It is deliberately conservative: it assumes 80% of the task automates, because the last 20% is usually the exceptions, and exceptions are why you keep people.
Built the citation-first agent layer at Nordwind, the triage agent at Veyra and the order run at Coastline Logistics.