Simplify Before You Automate

Automation can be key to business efficiency, but only if done right. Smart orgaizations know if they first simplify a process before they automate it, this will ultimately lead to reaping the greatest amount of rewards from the automation process.

Certainly, automation can reduce cost, create more throughput and, in many cases, improve quality. Theoretically, any process can be automated. Some are more difficult than others. One key to improving the success of automation is to simplify your process before attempting to automate it. Benefits of simplifying include:

• Ease of automation;
• Reduced cost of automation;
• Easier transition from current process;
• Higher return on investment;
• Locked-in improvements.

It is just plain easier to automate a simple process than a complex process, and the greater the complexity, the greater the difficulty and cost. Complex processes generally require more complex automation, which is more difficult to design, build, debug and install than their simpler counterparts. This difficulty consumes capital investment, lowering your payback.

Finally, once a process is automated, it is usually difficult to change. This provides the benefit of process standardization, but makes process improvement difficult. Generally, improvements are best made before automating. Failure to do so may cut you off from ever getting those improvements implemented.

Types of Processes
Not all processes are equally suitable for automation. We can group most processes into three broad categories: physical, transactional and hidden mental processes. There may be other ways to categories processes, but this will suffice for our discussion.

Physical processes are those that accomplish physical work, such as machining, assembly, transporting and shipping. Transactional processes accomplish non-physical work, such as order processing, scheduling, inventory management (excluding the physical part) and payroll processing. Hidden mental processes accomplish non-physical work by thinking, such as assessment, diagnosis, design, quoting and other processes that are generally thought to require judgment.

Hidden mental processes are usually the most difficult to automate, simply because they are not well understood. They are what goes on in the head of an expert—a doctor diagnosing a medical condition, a mechanic analyzing a malfunctioning machine, a TSA agent reviewing images of luggage to find security threats. These are all processes, but not well understood, even by the experts themselves. These may well be processes worth automating, but until their steps can be identified, they simply are not suited for automation.

Physical and transactional processes are often excellent candidates for automation, though the approaches are quite different. Physical processes are automated through machinery, which must be engineered, fabricated and installed. Transactional processes are typically automated through computers and software. Even so, both types of processes share the common characteristic of being composed of a sequence of work steps, each of which accomplishes a function. The clear identification of those steps must be done before the process can be automated.

Such a well defined process may be then automated, but that can result in excessive complexity and cost, often providing lower performance than needed. No process can be automated without first defining its steps, but the second step should always be simplification.

Simplifying the Process
At the most basic level, simplification is merely a review of the process, removing steps that are not necessary. This can appear almost silly, since why should there be unnecessary steps in any process? Every process, even the best, contains both value-added and non-value-added steps. The value-added steps are those that directly contribute to accomplishing the purpose of the overall process. Non-value-added steps do not. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be any, but it always seems to happen.