When to Automate, When to Redesign, and When to Leave the Process Alone
“Automating an inefficient process only creates automated inefficiency. A pragmatic framework for operational leaders navigating workflow modernization.”
The first instinct of modern operations managers is often to build an automated integration between disparate tools. However, automating a redundant step merely cements waste into the software architecture.
Before engineering an automation pipeline, we apply a 3-step triage: 1) Eliminate the redundant hand-off completely; 2) Redesign the remaining steps for lean simplicity; 3) Automate the simplified target state.
In many cases, the highest-ROI intervention is not building a new script, but removing a superfluous approval gate that was instituted a decade ago.
Speed comes from subtraction as much as automation.
How does this framework apply to your enterprise?
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