Ask the owner of an automation project what it saved and the answer is often a feeling. The team seems less busy. The close feels smoother. Nobody has the number, because nobody took it before the work started.
What a baseline is
A baseline is four figures for each process: how many cases arrive in a month, how long each takes, what each costs in staff time, and how often it goes wrong. The figures do not need to be precise to the minute. They need to be agreed. Both sides sign off on them before anything changes, and the same method is used to take them again once the change is live.
It takes days, not months
Volumes are already in the systems. Time per case can be sampled by shadowing a handful of cases end to end and by reading timestamps that already exist. Error rates come from the rework queue, the corrections log, or the inbox where the complaints arrive. A few days of attention produces figures good enough to make a decision with, which is all a baseline is for.
The baseline decides where to start
The process everyone complains about is often not the one that costs the most. Volume, repeatability and cost per case rank candidates better than visibility does, and a baseline is the only way to see the candidates side by side. It is also the only way to say, with a straight face, that a process is not worth automating.
Why savings-based deals go wrong
Fees paid from the client's savings sound well aligned. They are also the most common place for engagements of this kind to end in an argument, because the argument is always about the baseline and the attribution. If the baseline was never agreed, every number is disputed. If it was, it rarely needs to be. Any vendor who offers to be paid from your savings should be asked, first, how the baseline will be taken and who signs it.
What a business case must contain
The baseline. The proposed change. The cost to build and run it. The payback period. And a plain statement of what the process will still require from people once the automation is live. If a candidate cannot support that case, the right recommendation is not to build it, and whoever wrote that recommendation has earned their fee.