To Automate or Not: That is the Question

Tracking the Break-point for Automation ROI should be an Automation Itself

Bill French

If there’s one thing I love about

Coda⁠

, it makes me look good. And if you think I’m irrationally blinded by Coda’s strong app-making abilities, know that I tried to build this app in Google Spaces, Notion, Airtable, and Astro - all had marginal automation outcomes.

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Get Coda

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Substack

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As it typically happens, on a random Friday I discovered an urgent need to assess a proposed automation processes for a friend - automate or continue to perform manual steps?

Is it possible to build an app in Coda that tells us if it’s wise to automate a process?

So I did what any Coda Maker would do - I built the app in about 4 hours using the new Pack Studio and a few simple formulas to make the results pretty.

I was most concerned about tracking the break-even point and needed a dynamic chart showing relative outcomes over the estimated life of proposed automation.

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The next chart shows a case where there are significant development investments (which dives deeper into the orange early in the lifespan), the likes of which this firm will often encounter with this tool.

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There’s nothing ground-breaking about this app; anyone with a spreadsheet can do this, but I wanted a solution that could be embedded in a proposal and integrated as part of a document process.

I also wanted mobile agility, the need to create a polished proposal while sitting in an airline seat. Yet again, Coda nails the landing.

The spreadsheet app that this approach displaces is fraught with issues, difficult to run without a laptop, and prone to mistakes along with copy/paste, etc. It’s a huge time-saver and best of all, it can compute the predicted saved time.

I would love to move this into the

Coda⁠

marketplace, but I have no time to focus; happy to entertain a partnership if there’s a developer who can run with this idea. I have lots of automation guidelines, good Pack code, and en entire manuscript draft on the topic which was partially

inspired by Elon Musk⁠

. This doc could be very valuable to a lot of people.

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