Many automation projects hit a simple question after a few months — “how much did we save?” — and have no clear answer. Usually it’s because nobody measured the current state before starting.
What a baseline measures
Three numbers are enough: how often the task happens each week, how long each one takes, and what share needs rework or re-routing. Those three numbers become the pilot’s success metric.
Process first, then tools
Automating a messy process just makes the mess faster. Before building an n8n workflow or an agent, map the current path, remove unnecessary steps and mark the points that need a human decision.
An example
Take expense invoice entry. The baseline says how many minutes each invoice takes and how many are entered wrongly. A bot like Sabtaa extracts and records ten invoice fields from a photo; with a baseline you can say exactly what changed.