A contractor in Loveland asked us to help him automate his quote follow-ups. He was sending 40 of them a week and it was eating his Thursday.
We watched the process before touching it. The quotes went out as PDFs. The follow-up was a separate email, written from scratch, referencing a number the customer could no longer find. About a third of the replies were customers asking him to resend the original quote.
If we had automated what he asked for, he would have sent 40 faster emails and generated the same 13 confused replies. The follow-up was not the problem. The quote was.
The question that comes before the tool
Every workflow has two kinds of steps. There are steps that produce something, and there are steps that exist to repair damage from an earlier step. Automating the second kind is how you end up paying a subscription to do something you should have deleted.
Before any tool goes in, ask this about the step you want to automate: if the step upstream were done properly, would this step still exist?
For the contractor, the answer was no. We changed the quote so the price, the scope, and the expiry date were in the body of the email rather than an attachment. The confused replies stopped. The follow-up dropped from 40 a week to 40 a week, but now they took four minutes instead of Thursday.
Then we automated the follow-up. That part took an afternoon and it was worth doing, because by then it was a real step.
Where this shows up most
Three patterns turn up over and over in businesses between 5 and 100 people.
Reformatting. Somebody exports data from one system and reshapes it so it fits another. This is almost always a sign that the two systems were never connected, and it is worth ten minutes of checking whether they can be before you spend a day teaching a tool to do it.
Chasing. Somebody spends their week asking other people for things. Usually the request was unclear, or it went to a person who was never going to answer, or there was no deadline in it. A tool that sends better chase emails is treating the symptom.
Rewriting the same explanation. If three people a week ask the same question, the answer belongs somewhere they can find it. A tool that writes the answer faster keeps the question alive.
What to do about it
Take the task that annoys you most this week. Write down the five steps before it and the five steps after it. Then look at the step you hate and ask whether it is producing something or repairing something.
If it is producing something, it is a good candidate. Automate it and get your time back.
If it is repairing something, go fix the thing upstream first. That fix is usually free, and it often makes the automation unnecessary. That is a better outcome than a faster broken process, even though it is a worse story to tell at a conference.
Being honest about which one you are looking at is most of the skill. The tools are the easy part.