Stop doing the same job twice.
Every small business has a handful of jobs that exist only because two systems never learned to speak to each other. They are dull, they are done by hand, and together they quietly cost about a day a week.
The jobs worth handing over.
An order arrives by email and somebody types it into the system by hand.
The same customer detail is updated in three places, or more often in one.
Monday morning goes on a report that is assembled the same way every week.
Invoices are raised from a spreadsheet somebody keeps in parallel.
Chasing a late payment depends on a person remembering to look.
Every new job starts with the same folder, checklist and template, made by hand.
One order, before and after.
This is the shape of nearly every job we take off a desk. The work does not vanish. It stops needing a person to carry it from one system to the next.
- An order arrives in the shared inbox.
- Somebody reads it and types it into the system.
- The customer is looked up, and about half the time created again by mistake.
- A confirmation gets written and sent by hand.
- The job is added to the spreadsheet the week is run from.
- On Friday somebody counts that spreadsheet up for the report.
- An order arrives in the shared inbox.
- Somebody glances at what came in and confirms it looks right.
Everything else still happens. The order is recorded, the customer is matched instead of duplicated, the confirmation goes out, and the report counts itself. A person is still in it once, at the point where judgement is worth something.
How we take it off your desk.
We start with the job that costs the most and is least interesting. Those two usually turn out to be the same job.
Find where the time goes
We look for the work that is done to a rule rather than to a judgement. That is the work a computer should be doing.
Cost each one honestly
Some jobs look automatable and are not worth it. We say which, so effort goes where it pays back.
Connect what already exists
Most of this is joining up tools you already own, rather than buying anything new.
Run it alongside you first
The automation runs in parallel while a person still checks it, until it has earned the trust.
Handle the exceptions
The awkward cases matter more than the ordinary ones. We decide together what should stop and ask a human.
Leave it documented
Written down, so everyone knows what runs, when, and what to do if it ever stops.
Questions owners usually ask.
Do we have to replace the tools we use now?
What happens when something goes wrong?
Will this replace somebody’s job?
How much time does this actually save?
Is our data safe in the middle of all this?
Tell us what your week keeps repeating.
Describe the job that gets done the same way every time. We will come back with whether it is worth automating and what it would take.