What should you automate first?
Most businesses automate the wrong thing first: the one that annoys them loudest. The more useful question is which kinds of work are suited to it at all, and which are better left with people.
Rule 1
Simplify before you automate
Automating an awkward process does not make it better. It makes it awkward faster, and harder to change afterwards. Automate an approval step that exists for historical reasons and you have just cast it in concrete for five years.
Before automating anything, ask: if we simply removed this step, what would break? For a surprising number of steps the honest answer is nothing.
Rule 2
Automate the path the information takes, not the person
The expensive work in a small business is rarely the thinking. It is the carrying: the same detail out of an email into a spreadsheet, out of the spreadsheet into a document, out of the document into another system. Nobody counts that as a task, which is why it appears in no report.
For one single job, write down where each piece of information is first created and where it travels next. Half a page is usually enough, and it is usually uncomfortable reading.
Rule 3
Preparing is not deciding
A system can prepare a draft without sending it. It can assemble an invoice without issuing it. That distinction is the most important part of any automation, and it is the part marketing material leaves out most often.
When somebody sells you automation, ask where a person still decides. If no clear answer comes back, the answer is nowhere.
Guide
What suits it well
Work with these properties can be handed over reliably. It repeats, it has one clearly correct outcome, and a mistake shows up quickly and can be undone.
Entering the same detail twice
The clearest case. The information already exists, it is just in the wrong place. There is no judgement here to replace.
Preparing documents from information you hold
Quotations, confirmations, invoices. If nine in ten follow the same structure, the assembling is mechanical. The checking is not.
Remembering and following up
A system does not forget that a quotation has been open for eleven days. People forget that reliably, especially in good weeks.
Making status visible
If three people have to be asked how far a job is, what is missing is not automation. It is a shared record of where things stand.
Moving information between systems
Two tools that need to know the same thing. That is integration, rarely spectacular, and it saves minutes every day.
Guide
What is better left with people
Not out of caution, but because automation is worse at it. This work has no single correct outcome, or the mistake is expensive and cannot be taken back.
Judgement under uncertainty
Whether this customer deserves an exception. Whether this date will really hold. Rules can be written down, but the rule was never the reason for the decision.
Exceptions
The rare case costs the most time and repays automation the least. Automate the nine ordinary cases and let the tenth stand out.
Delicate customer communication
A complaint, a delay, a conversation about price. A prepared draft helps. An automatically sent message damages the relationship faster than saying nothing would.
Anything irreversible
Moving money, deleting something, committing to a date. The question is not whether the system can do it. It is what happens when it does it wrongly two hundred times overnight.
Work you cannot explain
If nobody can write down how a step works, it is not ready to be automated. It is ready for a conversation about what actually happens there.
Guide
A workable order
When several things qualify, this order helps. It is not sorted by effort but by how certain the benefit is.
- Duplicate entry that happens daily. Most certain benefit, lowest risk.
- One shared record of what is open. Fixes searching and following up at the same time.
- Document preparation for the ordinary case, with a person releasing it.
- Reminders about open items, driven by a reason rather than only a schedule.
- Integration between two systems that need to know the same thing.
If an exception springs to mind immediately against one of these, that is not an obstacle. It is the information that this one should be simplified first and automated second.
Guide
Three common mistakes
Starting with the loudest thing
The task everyone complains about is often rare and complicated. The task that costs four minutes a day and nobody mentions is usually the better place to start.
Automating instead of deciding
Some processes are complicated because a decision was never made. Automation then gets used to keep avoiding it, and makes it more expensive to make later.
Nobody owns it any more
After automation it has to be clear who notices when it stops working. A silent failure nobody spots for three weeks is worse than the manual work it replaced.
If you are not sure where you stand
The Business Friction Check asks six questions about things that happen in an ordinary week and names the kind of friction your business has. No score, no email required, and it is allowed to conclude that there is nothing to do right now.
Take the Business Friction CheckOr just tell us how the work happens today. Ask for a conversation