What should you automate? A simple calculation
Not everything needs automating. A short calculation is enough to find where to start.
Automation brings big projects to mind. Yet the automations that save the most time are usually small, boring and repeated every day: preparing a report, moving a file from one place to another, running the same ten steps for every new user.
The simple calculation
Answer three questions for a task:
- How many times a month is it done?
- How many minutes does it take each time?
- When something goes wrong, how long does the fix take?
A task done 20 times a month that takes 15 minutes adds up to 5 hours a month. Add errors and fixes and that often doubles. If setting up the automation takes a few days, the total time saved exceeds the time spent on setup.
A good candidate for automation
- The steps are clear and the same every time
- It repeats often
- Mistakes are expensive
- The data is digital and accessible
Things to watch
Automation speeds up a bad process but doesn’t fix it. Simplify the process first, then automate it. Give every automation an owner, a log and an error alert; an automation that silently stops is more dangerous than none at all.
We listen to your repetitive tasks and pick together the one that will save the most time.