SabanaTech

RPA

The total cost of an RPA bot at month 13

An RPA programme's true cost is not the build. It's the maintenance you didn't budget for, the bots that quietly stopped working, and the compounding sprawl of badly-named workflows. Here's the model we use to keep month-13 honest.

SabanaTech Team· RPA Practice
6 min read

Most RPA business cases die quietly between month nine and month fifteen. The build came in on budget, the bot saved the hours the deck promised, and then a UI changed, the queue backed up, an exception lane fell silent, and somebody on the operations team started doing the work by hand again. The original ROI math never accounted for any of that.

The four costs that show up after launch

  1. Drift maintenance — the upstream system changes, the bot breaks, the fix consumes 1–4 days of senior time.
  2. Exception handling — the bots leave 5–15% of volume unprocessed; somebody has to action it. Budget this as a fractional FTE, not as zero.
  3. Process change — the underlying business process changes faster than the bot does. Each material change triggers a re-spec.
  4. Sprawl tax — once you have 30+ bots, finding which one to fix takes an hour. Without a catalogue, time-to-fix doubles every dozen workflows.

A maintenance budget that survives audit

Our default model: 18% of original build cost per bot per year for the first two years, dropping to 12% in steady state. That covers monitoring, exception triage, change requests under 2 days of effort, and platform upgrades. It does not cover net-new functionality.

The bot catalogue is the single highest-leverage artefact

We require every engagement to ship a bot catalogue: name, owner, business process, system dependencies, schedule, last-changed date, and one paragraph of business context. Six months later, when something breaks at 7am, the on-call engineer can answer 'what should this be doing?' in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.

When to retire a bot

RPA programmes accumulate bots that nobody runs. We sweep the catalogue twice a year and retire any bot under 50 runs in the previous quarter. The exception is monthly close bots — those have to be measured against close-week activity, not a rolling 90-day window.

Sweeping is the only way to keep an RPA programme honest. The cost of a retired bot is zero. The cost of a forgotten bot is the time it takes the next engineer to figure out whether it still matters.

All insightsBook a discovery call

Keep reading