.svg)
Work nobody will miss
Recurring processes disappear into the background: moving data, reading documents, connecting systems. With approvals in the places where they matter.
- Process automation
- Process automation is the handover of recurring steps to software: moving data, reading documents, connecting systems. Unlike a script, approvals and an audit trail stay part of the process.
The most expensive software is the one nobody connected.
Almost every company has a person retyping numbers from one system into another, because two programs do not talk to each other.
It rarely gets noticed, because no invoice is ever issued for it. Twenty minutes a day is about eighty working days over a year, and every transfer carries the chance of a transposed digit.
Automation takes that part out. Not the decisions, only the transferring. Whatever needs judgement stays with your people and gets an approval in front of it.
What actually changes
From a live project: handling one event, step by step.
What we work with
The choice follows your landscape, not our preference.
Orchestration
The rhythm of the whole thing: triggers, order, retry on failure. Runs entirely inside your network on request.
Connecting systems
Through the interfaces that exist. Where none does, through file exchange or by operating the interface itself.
Reading documents
Delivery notes, invoices and forms in changing layouts. Text recognition plus check rules; anything uncertain goes to a person.
Approvals
In front of amounts, deadlines and anything visible outside. Whoever approves sees beforehand what is about to happen.
Logging
Every run leaves a trace: what, when, with which data, with which result. Without it there is no way to find a fault later.
Monitoring
If a process stalls, the system reports it before the first customer calls.
Automate or leave it
Two things decide it: how often the process runs and how unambiguous the rules are.
A clear case
The same process daily, with no judgement involved. The benefit is visible within the first year and the build stays manageable.
Decide first
When three colleagues do the process differently, the technology is not the problem. The process has to be decided first, automated second.
Solve it small
A process that runs monthly does not carry a system of its own. Often a template, a better form or a small script is enough.
Leave it
This is where we advise against it. Build and maintenance outweigh the benefit, and we would rather say that now than later.
Four steps to the first run
We start with one process, not five. The first one shows whether the assumptions hold and produces the measurements for everything after it.
We record the baseline before the start, otherwise the benefit cannot be shown later.
Watch
We follow the process and measure how long it takes today.
Define
Rules, exceptions and the points where a person decides.
Build
Connections, flow, approvals and logging, checked in a test system.
Go live
First alongside the old way, then alone. Then we measure again.
What this costs
Four questions before the first process
If you can answer these, half the work is done.
- How often does the process run? And how long does it really take today, measured rather than estimated.
- Where is the decision made? Every step that needs judgement stays with a person and gets an approval.
- What happens in the exceptional case? A process without a defined abort is a process that will quietly work wrong at some point.
- Who maintains this in two years? If the answer is nobody, we build it simpler.
Process automation: common questions
Related topics
Name the process that annoys you most.
Thirty minutes are enough to say whether it can be automated and roughly what it costs.