4 min
What to automate first in a manual process
The step people complain about is rarely the step worth automating first.
When a team first looks at automating something, the step that gets named is usually the one people dislike. That is a reasonable instinct and a poor starting point.
Dislike is not the same as cost
The step people complain about is often the one that is boring but quick. The expensive step is usually the quiet one: the check nobody minds doing, run four times a day, every day, by someone whose time is worth more than that.
A better question than “what is annoying” is “what is repeated, and what does it cost when it goes wrong”.
Three things to look for
The work repeats in the same shape. Not similar work — the same work. If each instance needs a different judgement, you are looking at a decision, and decisions are not what to automate first.
The rules already exist somewhere. In a spreadsheet, a checklist, a written procedure, or in the way one person has always done it. If the rules have to be invented before anything can be built, that invention is the real project, and it should be done deliberately rather than hidden inside a build.
A mistake is expensive or hard to spot. A step where errors are caught immediately is lower risk than one where they surface three weeks later in an invoice. The second is worth more attention even if it takes less time.
What to leave alone
The judgement. Whether to accept a price increase, whether a submission is good enough to send, whether a customer gets an exception — these are the parts of the job that the person is actually employed for. A system that takes them over has to be right every time, and none of them are, so it will be overridden until people stop trusting it.
A system that prepares the decision, shows what it is based on, and leaves the call to a person is both easier to build and easier to keep.
The honest first step
Pick one process. Write down what comes in, what goes out, and what a person does in between. Most of the time that document alone shows where the work is, and it is rarely where the complaining was.
That is also how an engagement here is scoped: understand it before proposing anything. For concrete cases to test the list against, see five manual process examples.