Resources · Tool
Automation Payback Calculator
Six inputs, an indicative cost band, and a payback period. It applies three thresholds that can each return don't build this — a floor on recoverable hours, a ceiling on payback period, and a test that the saving clears its own running cost. Those thresholds are the reason this is worth reading.
Everything below runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to us, stored, or logged, and closing the tab discards it. The figures are pre-filled with an ordinary example so you can see the shape of the answer — replace them with yours. Raise the build complexity or drop the volume and the same example stops passing.
The work as it stands
UNIT 01Take one process, not a department. The calculator is only honest at the level where somebody can actually count.
How many times the task runs in a typical month.
Hands-on time for one run, start to finish. Waiting time does not count unless somebody is watching it.
Fully loaded: salary, CPF, benefits and overhead, not the hourly rate on a payslip. For most Singapore SME back-office roles this lands between S$28 and S$55.
What kind of decision it is
UNIT 02This is the input people get wrong, and it decides the answer. Automation takes on a share of the work, and hands part of that share back as supervision.
What it would take to build
UNIT 03Cost is driven by how many boundaries the build crosses, not by how clever it is. Bands are indicative ranges for the Singapore SME market, quoted wide on purpose.
Result
UNIT 04Build it
10 monthsPayback, worst case
Pays for itself in about 10 months
The process consumes about 1075 hours a year today, including rework. Automation of the kind you have described can take on 753 of those, and hands back 135 as supervision and exception handling — leaving 617 genuinely recoverable hours, worth S$23,448.
Against a build of S$8,000 to S$18,000 and running costs near S$2,400 a year, that repays between 5 months and 10 months. That is a straightforward case. The thing most likely to break it is not the technology — it is whether the 135 hours of supervision land on somebody who has time for them.
- Current annual effort
- 1,075 hours
- Handed back as supervision
- 135 hours
- Genuinely recoverable
- 617 hours
- Value of recovered time
- S$23,448 / yr
- Indicative build
- S$8,000 – S$18,000
- Running cost
- S$2,400 / yr
- Net annual benefit
- S$21,048
- Payback range
- 5 months – 10 months
Take it with you
↓The result as plain text. Paste it into an email, a board paper, or a request for quotation — no address needed, and it stays readable when it is forwarded to somebody who was not in the room.
What this assumes
UNIT 05A calculator whose workings are hidden is an argument you cannot check. These are the assumptions behind the number above, so you can disagree with them in specific rather than general terms.
- Rework costs 1.5× a first-pass run. A redo is the task again plus the work of establishing that it was needed.
- Supervision is charged against the saving. Automated work is checked, and exceptions still land on a person. Rules-shaped work gives about 10% of the automated time back; judgement-shaped work gives back 30%.
- Running cost is 15–22% of the build midpoint a year, with a floor of S$2,400. That covers licences, support, and the hours the system will demand from whoever owns it.
- Cost bands are indicative for the Singapore SME market and are quoted wide deliberately. A point estimate from six inputs would be false precision, and a vendor quoting one from this little information is guessing at you rather than for you.
- No benefit is claimed for quality, speed or risk. Those are frequently the real reason to automate and they are genuinely hard to price, so they are left out entirely. If the case only works once you count them, that is worth knowing about the case.
The thresholds that return a stop are 120 recoverable hours a year, a payback longer than 36 months at the top of the cost band, and any saving that fails to clear its own running cost.
Technical references
UNIT 06What the reasoning on this page is drawn from. Where a standard costs money to read it is marked, and where a free document covers the same ground better it is listed first.
- SAE JA1011Paid standardSAE InternationalThe evaluation criteria for reliability-centred maintenance. The discipline behind asking which failure mode before buying any sensor.
- ISO 42001 explainedISOISO's own free summary. The right first read if you are deciding whether certification is relevant before buying the standard.
Links open in a new tab so anything you have entered above survives. Every one was checked at build time; if one has rotted since, tell us and it comes out rather than getting patched from memory.
Every one of these tools is a compressed version of a conversation. If yours turned up something you would rather talk through than read about, that is what the scoping call is for — bring your result with you.
Pressure-test these numbers with an engineerAlso on the shelf
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