What is a business automation system, and when is one worth it?

What it actually is

Most businesses do not have one system. They have a handful of good tools that each do their bit, and a person in the middle who moves information between them: reading an enquiry here, typing it there, updating a sheet, sending the confirmation.

An automation system is the part of your own system that replaces the person in the middle. Not the judgement, which stays with people. Just the moving, the chasing and the checking.

What it is not

It is not artificial intelligence, and treating the two as the same thing leads people to expensive answers to simple problems. Most of what costs a business its week is not hard to decide, it is just tedious to do, and tedious is exactly what software has always been good at.

It is also not replacing your team. The work that gets removed is the work nobody wanted: retyping, chasing, checking whether something got done.

The three shapes it usually takes

Moving information, so the same fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed rather than being copied by hand into three places.

Chasing what has not happened, so the unpaid invoice, the unreturned form and the booking with no confirmation surface on their own instead of when somebody remembers to look.

Producing what somebody currently makes by hand, which is most often the report that takes a morning every week and is out of date by the afternoon.

How to tell whether it pays

Count the hours honestly, including the ones that are spread thin. Twenty minutes a day is two weeks a year, and it is usually being done by someone whose time is worth considerably more than the task.

Then count the cost of the mistakes, which is the part people leave out. Copying by hand goes wrong at a rate, and the wrong price on an invoice or a missed booking costs more than the minutes it took to type.

If the total looks small on its own, add up the other jobs like it. It is rarely one job, and four or five of them together are what a system pays back against.

Where to start, if it does pay

Start with the single most repeated thing, not the most annoying one. The most annoying task is usually rare, which is why it stings; the most repeated one is where the hours actually are.

And write down what currently happens, step by step, before anyone builds anything. Half the time that document is the deliverable: it exposes two steps that exist for a reason nobody remembers, and removing those is free.

Related questions