What does manual coordination cost your procurement team?
This calculator estimates the annual cost of the coordination work in your procurement team — interpreting, chasing, consolidating and rekeying — and the share that governed autonomous execution could address. Every input is yours, the formula is shown, and the output is illustrative rather than a forecast.
Move the sliders to match your operation
Count only coordination effort. Approvals and commercial judgement are work you want people to do.
Coordination hours per year
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Cost of that coordination effort
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Addressable at your chosen share
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Formula
- Coordination hours = hours per week × 46 working weeks × employees
- Hourly cost = annual loaded cost ÷ 1,840 working hours
- Coordination cost = coordination hours × hourly cost
- Addressable effort = coordination cost × addressable share
Every figure above comes from the values you entered, using the formula shown. It is a planning model, not a quotation or a guarantee. Its strength in a board paper is that the inputs are yours and the arithmetic is visible.
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Nothing is stored until you ask for it. We will send your figures over — useful when you are writing the board paper a fortnight later.
Questions people ask. While the numbers are on screen.
Any point at which a person must read, interpret, decide, chase, rebuild or retype something to move work forward. The distinction that matters is whether the touch requires judgement, which you want people doing, or only attention, which is the addressable part.
Loaded cost rather than salary — salary plus employment costs, divided by working hours. Using salary alone understates the figure by roughly a third and invites a challenge you do not need.
It varies by workflow and by how much of your process is already structured. Enter something conservative. A figure a sceptical finance director can revise downward and still find the conclusion holds is worth more than an optimistic one.
Show the inputs before the output. The strength of this figure is that every assumption is yours and the arithmetic is visible, which is exactly what a vendor benchmark cannot offer. Invite them to change an assumption in the room.
No. It sizes the coordination effort currently being spent, using your own inputs. What proportion of that is removable depends on your policy, data and workflows, which is what a working session establishes.
How to make the number defensible
- Measure rather than estimate. Ask three buyers to log coordination time for a fortnight; the result is usually more persuasive than any assumption.
- Keep the addressable share conservative. A defensible smaller number survives scrutiny; an optimistic one invites it.
- Separate coordination from decision time explicitly, so nobody can argue you are proposing to automate judgement.
- Pair the figure with a baseline of manual touches per workflow, which is the measure that will move first.
Test the assumption against a real workflow.
Bring the process that consumes the most coordination effort and we will run it end to end, so the estimate can be replaced with something observed.
Someone from client success replies, not a sales sequence. If we are not a fit we will say so on the first call.
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