Making business case to justify recipes

[mppowe]

Good morning all,

I'm curious if anyone out there has a process they use to "justify" new integrations/recipes using the Recipe-Based Pricing that Workato uses. We're still new-ish to the platform and so are only now approaching the max number of recipes we were allotted before we have to start paying for new ones. So I'm curious how others make a business case to justify the cost of additional recipes, in order to decide whether using Workato is the "best" option for a given integration, or if it's cheaper to build something in-house.

Thanks!

[justinmnorris]

The business risk of having automations/integrations fragmented across multiple platforms / in-house custom scripts would be one primary point to consider, from a Workato vs. DIY perspective.

In terms of justifying the recipe itself, a few lenses to look through:

- Time Saved: people time per year * average salary

- Incremental [X], where [X] is the business goal that the stakeholder wants to solve for - more candidate pipeline for the HR team, more revenue pipeline for the marketing team, faster month-end for the finance team, or whatever. This obviously involves some guestimation sometimes, but can at least show a reasonable line of thought.

There's always a possibility the ROI is not there and something shouldn't be integrated or automated in the first place.

[hj-kiran]

Hello Mike,

Hope you are well. I understand where you are coming from as we are in a similar situation. I am new to workato with 6 years overall experience in integrations.

The justification is simple - the automation will reduce man hours which in turn saves money. However, the whole automation will have to be vetted thoroughly by Business Analysts, Developers and all relevant teams to check the worthiness of the automation. There could be a better solution where we would not need a middleware.

Coming to licensing . We need to use callable recipies as much as possible. As callable recipes are not considered for licensing unless it is called from an external source.

Hope this helps 😊

Thanks and Regards,

Kiran H J 

[mroldanvega]

Hi Mike,
I like to use a matrix (workato vs other) for these type of scenarios and use the criteria that is important to your business.
Things that would matter to us would probably be:

. How long to build a solution?
. How many resources to build a solution?
. How much time for maintenance?
. How many resources to maintain?
. How many systems/apps/languages involved?
. Will it generate revenue? How much?
. How long to start generating revenue?
. How long to ramp up a new resource on this automation?

Hope this helps!
-Manny.