We are piloting an AI data-extraction tool for our logistics coordinators. How do we establish a hard 60-day baseline and ROI milestone during the pilot before committing to an annual enterprise contract?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Do not start the pilot until you establish your pre-pilot baseline on paper. Software vendors want you to measure sentiment or ask your coordinators if they feel less stressed. That is noise. You need hard operational numbers.

Select a single measurable metric before handing credentials to your team. In logistics, that usually means the number of shipping manifests processed per hour, the time required to match bills of lading to purchase orders, or the rate of input errors caught downstream. Run a two-week time study of the current manual process to document the exact labor hours spent per unit of work.

Once the pilot begins, lock the trial period to sixty days with strict gates:

- Day 1 to 14: System setup, workflow integration, and coordinator training on the documented Standard Operating Procedure.
- Day 15 to 45: Live operation where the tool processes at least fifty percent of incoming documents alongside human quality checks.
- Day 46 to 60: Full operational run. Measure total hours spent against the baseline and audit the error rate.

Calculate the return at day fifty-five. Take the hours saved per week, multiply by the fully loaded hourly cost of the coordinator seat, and annualize that figure. If the annualized savings do not equal at least three times the annual cost of the software license, kill the pilot. If the tool creates capacity but increases downstream billing errors, kill it. Only sign the contract if the tool produces verifiable hours that can be reallocated to higher-value operational tasks.