Automation isn’t a single project
“Automate the business” is too vague to start with. The teams that get real value from automation pick one specific, recurring, manual task and fix it completely, rather than trying to automate everything at once.
How to find the right first task
- It happens often — daily or weekly, not once a quarter
- It’s manual and repetitive — the same steps, done by hand, every time
- It’s error-prone — mistakes happen because a human is re-typing the same data
- It has a clear trigger and outcome — easy to know when it starts and when it’s done
Data entry between two tools, approval routing, and scheduled reports are the most common starting points, because they hit all four criteria in most businesses.
What to avoid
Don’t start by automating a process you haven’t fully mapped out yet — automating a broken process just makes the broken process run faster. Fix the process, then automate it.
Our take
We build one automation, verify it’s actually saving time, then move to the next — rather than proposing one large system that takes months to ship. See our Business Process Automation service.