GATE — Feasibility & ROI Validation

Protect capital by running every opportunity discovered in SCAN through a financial, technical, and operational gate check before allocating build resources.

Primary Objective

CFO-Grade Financial & Technical Gate Check

Typical Duration

1 Week

Core Stakeholders

CFO / Finance Director, Lead Solution Architect

Overview & Objectives

Just because a process can be automated doesn't mean it should be. The GATE stage provides explicit governance designed to filter out money-losing or high-maintenance bots. We weigh technical friction against financial upside to establish a hard go/no-go decision.

Grounding our projections in 15+ years of hands-on delivery experience, we model total cost of ownership (TCO) — including software licensing, cloud run-costs, dev sprints, and long-term maintenance — against net FTE hours recovered.

Validation Vectors

Technical Feasibility Score: Evaluating UI element stability, application refresh latencies, virtual desktop/Citrix environments, and API availability.
Payback & TCO Modeling: Calculating 12, 24, and 36-month ROI horizons, accounting for license overhead (UiPath, Power Automate, Azure AI) vs. labor hours offset.
Risk & Exception Auditing: Estimating exception frequency (data anomalies, missing fields) to ensure error-handling will not overwhelm support teams.

The Hard Gate Threshold

If a candidate process exhibits an expected payback horizon exceeding 14 months or a technical complexity score above 85/100, it is gated until the workflow can be simplified in Stage 03 (BLUEPRINT).

Stage Deliverables

Upon completing the GATE phase, leadership receives complete financial and technical clarity:

CFO Feasibility Scorecard: A multi-variable matrix evaluating technical risk, exception rates, and infrastructure readiness.
12-Month Payback Model: Line-item budget breakdown covering development investment, license footprints, and projected operational cost recovery.
Go / No-Go Charter: Executive approval document specifying whether to proceed, hold, or redesign.