What to automate first, and what to leave alone
Automation saves the most when you start with the right task. A simple way to choose it, and the work that's better left to people.
Upeo Afrika2 min read
Most businesses have more routine work than they realise. The question isn't whether anything can be automated, it's where to start. Start in the wrong place and you spend weeks on something that saves ten minutes a month. Start in the right place and your team gets hours back every week.
Look for work that's frequent, predictable and boring
The best first candidates share three things. They happen often, every day or many times a day. They follow the same steps each time. And nobody enjoys doing them. Matching payments to invoices, sending receipts, answering the same handful of questions and copying details from forms into a system are classic examples.
A quick way to find them: ask each person on your team what they did yesterday that they'd happily never do again. The same answers tend to come up.
Count the time honestly
For each candidate, write down roughly how long it takes and how often it happens. A task that takes five minutes but happens forty times a day is worth far more than a monthly report that takes two hours. This simple sum usually makes the first choice obvious.
Check what a mistake would cost
Some routine work is low risk: a reminder that goes out an hour late does little harm. Other work touches money or important decisions. Both can be automated, but the second kind needs a person to approve the result before it goes anywhere. Starting with lower-risk work lets everyone build trust in the system first.
What to leave alone, at least for now
- Work that changes every time and depends on judgement, such as negotiating with a customer or handling a complaint.
- Processes you haven't settled yet. Automating a messy process just makes the mess faster.
- Rare tasks that take little time. The effort to automate them rarely pays back.
Run it side by side before you switch
However confident you are, let the automation run alongside the manual process for a while and compare the results. When they match, switch over. When they don't, you've found a rule that needs adjusting, and you've found it without any harm done.
Good automation doesn't guess. When something doesn't fit the rules, it stops and asks a person.
If you'd like a second opinion on where to start, we're happy to walk through your daily routine with you and point out the tasks worth automating first, and the ones that aren't.
