Automation Readiness

How to know if you are ready to automate a process

Your Automation Readiness

We have not yet met a business owner that does not want to automate as much as they can, but not all businesses are ready to automate yet. This does not mean we cannot work together, it just means that our focus must first begin with clarifying your business logic and processes in order to develop a stable logical foundation upon which we can build reliable technology.

Automation is the fastest way to scale a mess – a word of warning about automation readiness.

If you automate a process before all of the variables and logical aspects are known, it will likely cause disappointment and maybe even negative brand experiences. Our job is to say when a workflow is NOT ready to automate, as much as it is to automate the workflow.

How to know if you are not yet ready to automate:

You have new and emerging workflows, or they are not currently documented or fully embedded within your team. When we automate, we aim to exactly replicate what a ‘done perfectly’ human

Your workflows are subject to imminent change, e.g. redesign / personnel change

You have an impending system change, e.g. new WMS, ERP or CRM which is integral to your workflows.

You do not have a correct ROI frame of reference based on the true total cost of ownership of your current manually executed systems. Until you experience the ‘aha’ moment of seeing a piece of software execute a process 50 times in the same time it would take your employee on £18/hour to do it once, it is unlikely you will see value in automation technology to the standard we develop.

Not prepared to fully scope. You know the details of your business, we know automation. We rely on you to define what ‘done’ looks like, including all data sources, variables and decision points. We are happy to do the scoping, but we need to access your knowledge and this can take time, patience and clarity.

Not prepared to fully test and refine. Even the best scoped systems suffer from imperfections due to emerging business logic and edge-cases that no-one thought about until we saw something the system did not do that it should have, or vice-versa. You must be prepared to test and help us to refine your systems to zone in on perfection before we unleash it to the world.

The best way to understand what we mean by workflow instructions

In the video below, a father follows the instructions his children provide to make a sandwich. It highlights the degree to which we rely on assumption and inference when explaining a workflow which we’re used to:

⁠

Loading…⁠

⁠

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.