Process automation
If a person does it the same way every time, it can usually be automated, and that person gets their time back.
Every business has jobs that nobody chose: copying details from one system to another, checking one list against another, chasing the same information every month, building the same report every Friday.
They're slow, they're error-prone, and they take your best people away from the work only they can do. Most of them can now be automated, often far more cheaply than people expect.
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Typical candidates
- Data entry: details from emails, forms or documents typed into another system
- Reconciliation: matching payments, orders, stock or bookings between systems
- Chasing: reminders, follow-ups and requests for missing information
- Reporting: the weekly or monthly report someone assembles by hand
- Onboarding: setting up a new customer, supplier or employee across several systems
- Sorting and routing: reading incoming requests and sending each to the right person
How I approach it
- Find the one that hurts most. Usually the job that's repeated most often, or the one that goes wrong most expensively.
- Build a first version, quickly. Often in a build session, with the person who does the job today.
- Run it alongside the old way until everyone trusts it.
- Then the next one. Each automation earns its place before the next is built.
I've written accounting ledger software, so I'm at home with the unglamorous detail that automation lives or dies by: the exceptions, the rounding, the cases that don't quite fit.
People stay in charge
Automation should take the drudgery, not the decisions. Anything unusual, uncertain or important goes to a person to check. The systems I build make it easy to see what was done automatically, and why.