ROI and Business Case

[YourCompany.com] · Operations Department · Prepared by FullSpec · [Today's Date]

This document sets out the financial case for automating your inventory reorder process. It translates the time your team currently spends on manual stock checks, spreadsheet comparisons, and purchase order creation into a dollar cost, then shows what that cost drops to after automation, what the tools and build investment total, and how quickly the spend pays for itself. The numbers are drawn from your process mapping session and cross-checked against industry benchmarks for operations roles at similar volume. Use this document to make the go or no-go call with confidence.

01What the current process is costing you

The three highest-friction steps in your current process:

• Compare stock levels against reorder points in Google Sheets (35 min per cycle, bottleneck): The coordinator manually scans every SKU row against a static threshold list. The threshold values are often months out of date, and any SKU added to Cin7 after the last spreadsheet update is invisible to this check. Missed SKUs translate directly to stockouts.
• Calculate reorder quantity by hand (25 min per cycle, bottleneck): Average sales velocity, lead time, and safety stock are pulled from memory or a separate reference sheet and combined without a formula. Seasonal demand and recent sales spikes are routinely underweighted, leading to either short orders or excess stock that ties up working capital.
• Get manager approval via email (40 min per cycle, bottleneck): The coordinator drafts an approval email, attaches the PO, and waits. During busy periods the email sits unread for hours or days, meaning the reorder window closes before the supplier ever receives the order. This single delay is the most common cause of emergency expediting costs.

02What changes after automation

After automation, the Reorder Calculation Agent and the PO Dispatch and Tracking Agent handle everything from stock monitoring through to supplier email, Xero bill creation, and acknowledgement chasing without any manual input. Your operations coordinator is removed from the repetitive cycle entirely. The one decision point that remains is the manager approval step: when a purchase order exceeds your defined threshold, a Slack message is sent to the operations manager with a one-click approve or reject option. Everything else runs continuously in the background, 24 hours a day, triggered the moment a SKU hits its reorder point in Cin7.

03Before and after comparison

04Tool costs

05Net ROI summary

06Assumptions log

All savings figures are calculated from the hourly rate and weekly hours confirmed during your process mapping session. If your team's actual rate or time spent differs, the numbers scale proportionally: each additional dollar per hour adds approximately $290 to the annual saving, and each additional hour per week adds approximately $1,664. If order volume grows beyond 30 POs per month, the time saving per week will increase because more reorder cycles will run without any coordinator involvement. Conversely, if your team is already partly using an automation platform subscription, the incremental tool cost falls further and the payback period shortens. FullSpec recommends revisiting this model at the 90-day post-launch review once actual hours-saved data is available from the live system.