Running Costs distribution

Feedback and bug reports Automation Hub
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#1

Hi,

In Cost Setup, when adding the cost for (for example) an Unattended License, that price is (let’s just say) $10.000/year.

Then, when using that cost in the Cost Benefit Analysis, it is added with that full license cost, although the automation is projected to maybe run for a totalt of 100 hours/year. Why is it not possible to factor this into the per-automation CBA, so we can get a realistic cost projection?

Anyone? …or maybe @Iulia_Istrate? :slight_smile:

#2

I don’t work on the Automation Hub side much (mostly development-side) but to the best of my understanding, this cost is included because it’s the minimum that automation will cost you whether or not you have other automation robots.
Picture a company only wanting to build a robot that runs 100 hours/year. They still need to spend the 10000 before seeing to any other benefits the bot might bring. In that sense, it is a realistic projection.

Not sure if that answers your question. Again, speaking in general terms, not specifically Automation Hub related.

#3

But that would make the business case for that first robot a very hard sell.
"Yess, boss, this robot will run for one hour every week, but cost us $150 to run (every week), just in licensing costs.

Pretty sure my boss could find someone to do that stuff manually for less than that.
Hell, I’d take the job :smiley:

Cheers,
Jeppe

#4

Haha… Good point.

But then, that’s why we don’t select 100 hours/year processes as the first candidate :wink:
Sure, a lot of thought goes into the selection, but considering the single license costs that I know of, a decent-sized process built within a POC scope can still earn its worth. (i.e. money spent for license and efforts)

#5

New discovery.

I just now found out that it’s possible to override the FTR (Full Time Robot), which seems to default to 1 (or more), but if you run an automation only 10% of the time, you can override the FTR and set it to (in this case) 0.1 instead of 1.0. This way, only 10% of the yearly license cost for the robot will be applied to the automation costs.

@Iulia_Istrate It would be really nice if it was possible to “slice” other running costs (infrastructure for example) in the same way, somehow.

Cheers,
Jeppe

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#7

Hello @jjes,

You can slice costs like:

  • Implementation people cost
  • RPA Software costs (like you mentioned, by overriding the FTR after automation)
  • Other Software costs (# Licenses field)
  • Support team (FTE field)
  • Other running cost (# Item field)

We will add an improvement to allow same behavior for Infrastructure as well.

Kind regards,
Iulia

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