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Which processes in your business are worth automating first
Not every manual task is worth automating. The process that earns its keep most is the one that repeats every day, passes through the same people and has a clear rule for what is right. Here is how to recognise it and which processes to leave manual.
Start from repetition, not from technology
The most common mistake is to start with the question “where do we put artificial intelligence”. The better question is where your people do the same action again and again. Automation earns its keep on repetition: the more often an action happens, the clearer it is what exactly to take over and the more work it frees.
So start with observation, not with choosing a program. Ask the people who do the work what they do every morning, every week and at the end of the month. These lists usually point to the same few places where time leaks away: copying between programs, matching spreadsheets and reminding from memory.
Five questions for every process
Ask these questions about every process that comes to mind. The more answers are “yes”, the better a candidate the process is.
- Does it happen every day or every week?
- Does it pass through the same people and the same documents?
- Is there a clear rule for what the right result is?
- Where is the costliest mistake: in money, in time or in a client’s trust?
- Is there a person who knows the exceptions and can settle them?
The last question decides. Automation does not remove exceptions. It sets them aside and hands them to a person. If nobody in the company knows how an exception is settled, that has to be understood first, before any program is bought.
Signs of a good candidate
There are a few situations that appear in almost every business and lend themselves well to automation:
- The same data is typed from a letter into a spreadsheet, from there into a program and finally into an invoice.
- Two spreadsheets that have to match are compared by eye at the end of the month.
- Who owes whom an answer is remembered from memory, and things get dropped.
- Approvals happen on the phone and in chat, and later nobody remembers who allowed what.
- The report for the manager is collected by hand from several places.
In each of these situations there is repetition, a clear rule and a person who settles the exceptions. That is where automation usually earns its place first.
Which processes are better left manual
We do not automate everything, and that is not a weakness of the method. Three kinds of process are better left manual:
- Processes that happen a few times a year. The effort of building and maintaining the automation is greater than the work itself.
- Decisions that carry risk for a person or for money without a check. There the system can only prepare, and a person decides.
- Processes where the rules are not yet clear or change every time. The rules are settled first, then the process is automated.
If your process is like this, we will tell you at the first meeting. It is better to leave it manual than to pay for a system nobody uses.
What the first step looks like
We do not start with the whole company. Together we describe how one real day goes and pick the one place where the most retyping happens. We automate that place first, on copies of your documents, so you can see what the system does before it goes live.
The system prepares and a person approves. Every step leaves a trace: who approved what and when. We move to the next process only when the first one already earns its place.
We do not promise how many hours will be freed before we have measured one sample task at your place. That is why there are no numbers on our site: we write only what we can show.
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