How To Determine if a Process Can Be Automated

Transcription

Typically, what happens in a business is that you want to offer some new value. Some person with a brain develops a process to deliver that value. Then it becomes your offering and people start buying it and using it and obtaining the value from the company. Over time that process becomes immature and stable and then things or humanness in managing this operation or this process kind of comes to bite us because humans with our brains, we’re great at creativity or granted novel experiences, but we’re really bad at doing the same thing over and over again.

What ends up happening is—well, there are really two things that happen. One is that people make mistakes. They get bored. They miss a step in a process. And there are breakdowns in their value chain. The other thing that happens is that if the process is or product is successful and started scaling up, the human resources that are powering it, they don’t scale. So you need to start hiring more people in to manage a process and that leads to other complexities.

So what we look for is coming into the business is where are the matured processes where we could offload tedious or not scalable tasks from the people and put that in the software rules and they give people a lighter interface into the process where they don’t have to do so much heavy lifting and do more light touches.

Places where we recommend you don’t automate or where human creativity plays a big part in it. If it’s responding to a customer on the phone, you don’t want to put them through a voice prompt system right away, right? Maybe you want to talk to a person so we can engage and understand the real problem. If there is a variety of solutions that might fit a person and you need a human to interpret the right selection, keep that with the human. Don’t make it a computer do that because from the customer side, when you look at that, you start feeling, well, basically not respected and that doesn’t really help your company.