When to Automate

The benefits of automating business processes that were once done by hand are immediately apparent: increased speed and efficiency, more accurate results, time saved in recording and re-entering information. However, the promise of automation is not a virtue in and of itself…

Answering the following questions can help you gauge the benefits of automating your manual processes.

Will Somebody Save Time?

It often seems easier for an organization to stick with an inefficient process. Because time wasted on an inefficient task is distributed throughout the company, it's easy to overlook the impact of that small amount of waste. In many cases, only the person doing the job may even know that a routine task could use improvement, and they're the most likely to stick to that routine because it's just "how it's done." They may not be in a position to recommend a different way of accomplishing this task, much less empowered to effect the change. Yet revising a process which wastes as little as half an hour a week-a little over five minutes a day- per worker can benefit from automation.

A good example is a mid-sized company which implemented a simple template in Microsoft Outlook, which helped their sales representatives automatically reply to commonly-asked questions. The cost of implementing this system was recovered within about a week; of still greater impact was the improvement in morale among the sales staff responsible for answering these e-mails.

Can We Make Fewer Errors?

Automation almost always reduces the most common human errors in repetitive tasks. In the example above, automation not only made sure the correct answer was delivered each and every time (increased accuracy), but also eliminated natural (and hopefully minor) variation in answers (increased consistency). In the case of inconsistent answers, salespeople had to face costly and frustrating changes in expectations as their prospects became customers, or if prospects dealt with different sales staff.

Delivering consistency isn't always as obvious a need as being accurate. There are many cases where a routine task is as much about cleaning the information in processing as it is manually collecting it. For instance, a Seattle area drywall company has a group of managers responsible for moving job data from the estimate database into the project database. At first, it seems that an immediate savings could be had by replacing high-level and relatively expensive employees with a less expensive machine. This would free their managers to focus on higher-value work.

The story is more complicated, however, because these managers aren't just moving data from one place to another, but also reorganizing, combining and prioritizing the job into logical work units. This in turn make their foremen more efficient in their jobs. So by simply moving the estimates to the project system as-is, the company risks creating "errors" in the project database because it isn't ready for use by foremen in the field.

Can We Positively Enforce Business Rules?

Although difficult to predict, this is among the most important questions a company can ask in this assessment. Automation can certainly improve consistency and accuracy, but often inadvertently prevents flexibility right when flexibility is most necessary.

Returning to the example of the sales force above, automation was used to address questions that truly had unique, authoritative answers that were appropriate for all prospective customers. But what if these questions needed to be answered differently depending on the customer's industry or the size of the prospective contract? In that case, salespeople might fall into the habit of letting the automated system do the thinking for them, instead of addressing specific needs of the prospect. Automation should never interfere with business success!

These three questions are vital to help you make an informed decision about automating a process or task. If the answers were easy to come by the first and second time you asked them, you've probably got a good idea whether or not automation is for you.

If the answers weren't so easy to determine conclusively, you'll probably find that even asking them in your company will be a great starting point for a more in-depth analysis of whether or not to automate.

-- EH

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