Manual process examples: five that are worth automating

Manual process examples are easy to list and hard to rank. Almost every team has a dozen of them, and most of the time nobody has written them down, because they have always been part of the job. This note names five of the most common, says what makes each one slow, and shows how to tell the ones worth automating from the ones that should stay with a person.

What is a manual process?

A manual process is recurring work where a person moves, checks or re-enters information by hand, following steps that are mostly the same each time. The test is the repetition, not the effort. A task that takes ten minutes but happens forty times a week is a manual process. A hard decision made once a quarter is not.

Two things are not manual processes in this sense: judgement calls and one-off jobs. A person deciding whether to accept a price increase is doing the work they are employed for. A person retyping the new prices into a spreadsheet is carrying data from one place to another.

What are examples of manual processes?

These five come from the kinds of work this studio scopes. No client results are published here, and none are implied: the point is to describe the shape of each process, not to claim an outcome.

1. Re-keying a supplier price list

A supplier sends a spreadsheet or a PDF in their own product codes. Someone matches each line to your catalogue, compares the price with the current one, and types the changes in. Most lines have not changed, so the real work is finding the few that have.

A system can match the codes, flag every change and hand back the lines it could not match. Whether to accept a change stays with a person. Why a supplier price list takes two days to check goes through it in full.

2. Reading figures out of PDFs and emails

Invoices, certificates and schedules arrive as documents. Someone reads a figure off the page and types it into another system. The errors come from tiredness and repetition, not from a lack of skill.

Extraction can do the reading, provided every value links back to the page it came from and the values it is unsure about go to a person. That condition is the difference between a demonstration and something you can rely on, which is covered in reading documents reliably.

3. Checking a document pack for what is missing

A submission, an onboarding file or a claim should contain a defined set of documents with defined fields. Someone opens each file and ticks a checklist. A system can compare the pack against the checklist and list the gaps, leaving the person to decide whether the pack is good enough to send. PacketSlip, this studio’s own product, applies that idea to commercial insurance submissions.

4. Copying the same data between two systems

An order arrives in one system and someone copies it into another, usually the accounting package. Two systems each hold part of the truth, and a person is the connection between them. The failure is quiet: the copy happens late or not at all, and the two systems disagree until somebody notices.

The fix is one reliable connection with a direction, a schedule and a record of what failed. It is the integration side of business systems work.

5. Building the weekly report from exports

Export from three tools, paste into one spreadsheet, correct the formats, produce a summary. The assembly is mechanical. Reading the result is not. Automating the assembly saves the hours, and leaving the interpretation with a person keeps the report worth reading.

Which manual processes are worth automating first?

Three questions sort the list, and the full reasoning is in what to automate first in a manual process:

• Does the work repeat in the same shape? Similar is not enough. If each instance needs a different judgement, it is a decision.
• Do the rules already exist? In a spreadsheet, a checklist or one person’s habits. If they have to be invented first, that is the real project.
• Is a mistake expensive or hard to spot? A step where an error surfaces three weeks later in an invoice deserves attention before one where it is caught at once.

All five examples above pass those tests. A process that fails the first one is not a candidate, however much people dislike it.

What should stay manual?

Judgement, exceptions and one-off work. Whether a customer gets an exception, whether a submission is good enough, whether a supplier’s increase is acceptable: a system that takes these over has to be right every time, and none of them are. A system that prepares the decision and shows what it rests on is easier to build and easier to keep trusting.

Quick answers

What is an example of a manual process in business?

Retyping a supplier price list into your own catalogue is a typical one. A person matches each line to a product, compares the price with the current one and enters the changes by hand, even though most lines are unchanged.

How do you know if a manual process should be automated?

Check three things: the work repeats in the same shape, the rules are already written down somewhere, and a mistake is expensive or hard to spot. If it needs a fresh judgement each time, it is a decision and should stay with a person.

Can every manual process be automated?

No. The handling can be automated: reading, matching, checking and copying. The judgement cannot be handed over safely, so a good system prepares the decision, shows what it rests on and leaves the call to a person.