Automation projects usually fail for one of two reasons: the wrong process was chosen, or a broken process was automated without being fixed first. Both are avoidable with a short, honest assessment before anyone builds anything.
The Four Screens
1. Frequency × time
A task that takes ten minutes and happens forty times a week is a far better candidate than one that takes a day and happens twice a year. Count both numbers rather than relying on how annoying the task feels — irritation and cost are only loosely related.
2. Error cost
Some manual steps are tedious but harmless. Others carry real downstream cost when they go wrong: mis-keyed pricing, a missed compliance deadline, an order shipped to the wrong address. High error cost raises priority even when the time saved is modest, because you are buying consistency as much as speed.
3. Stability of the rules
Automation encodes rules. If the rules change every quarter, you are signing up to change the automation every quarter. Stable, well-understood rules automate well. Processes still being argued about should be settled first — on paper, cheaply.
4. Clarity of the decision points
Where a person exercises judgement, ask what they are actually weighing. Sometimes it is a rule nobody has written down, which can be encoded. Sometimes it is genuine expertise about context and exceptions, which should stay with the person — and the automation should hand off to them cleanly rather than pretending to replace them.
Strong Candidates
- Re-keying the same data between two systems — the most common and most reliably worthwhile automation there is.
- Reports assembled by hand on a schedule.
- Routing and approvals currently run over email, where status is invisible and nothing is auditable.
- Document generation from data that already exists in a system.
- Notifications that depend on somebody remembering to send them.
Poor Candidates, For Now
- Processes nobody can describe consistently. Document first; automating disagreement produces an automated argument.
- Processes about to be replaced by a new system. Wait.
- Work that is genuinely different every time — automating the exception path is rarely worth it.
- Anything where the manual step is the only quality control. Replace the control before removing the person.
Fix Before You Automate
Automating a bad process makes bad outcomes arrive faster and with more confidence. If a step exists only as a workaround for a limitation, remove the limitation. If approvals go to four people because nobody trusts the data, fix the data. The cheapest automation is often the step you delete.
Start Small and Visible
The first automation should be something the team feels within a fortnight. Early credibility determines how much cooperation the second and third projects receive — and cooperation, not technology, is usually the binding constraint.
Related service: Business process automation services