Article
When You Should Not Automate a Business Process
In the wave of automation and AI, few people ask when to stop. That question rescues many projects.
Automation magnifies what is already there
A tidy process gets faster. A messy process gets messy faster. Automation is not process improvement, it is a multiplier.
Five questions
- Is the process stable? If the rules change every month, the automation keeps breaking.
- Does it rarely happen? Work done once a month is often cheaper to do by hand.
- Does it need judgement? Decisions that depend on context and relationships should stay with people.
- Who fixes it when it breaks? Automation without an owner becomes hidden debt.
- Can something just be removed? An unnecessary step is better deleted than automated.
A common example
A five-level approval chain gets automated, though three of the levels just press a button. The automation speeds up a chain that should be cut.
What remains worth doing by people
Conversations with customers, handling exceptions, and judging whether the process itself still makes sense. The goal of automation is to give time for work like this.
The order we follow
Understand the process, simplify it, then automate. The reasoning is in why CRM implementations fail.