Don't Automate It Yet

In our last few insights, we've looked at data hiding across a factory, the cost of small manual tasks, and how basic KPIs can be misleading.

There is a common thread between all three:

Before improving something, understand what is actually happening.

Yet when a company finds a slow manual process, the first questions are often:

“How can we automate this? How can we make this faster?” etc

A better question is:

“Why does this process exist in the first place?”

Consider a simple example.

A production order is manually entered into two different systems.

The obvious solution is to automate the data entry.

But perhaps the second system only needs the information because the two systems don't communicate properly.

Automating the copy-and-paste doesn't fix the underlying problem. It just makes the workaround faster.

The same thing happens elsewhere:

• An unnecessary approval gets automated.

• Inefficient paperwork gets turned into a digital form.

• Software is built around a broken process.

• A dashboard is created that nobody actually needs.

• A manual reconciliation process is automated instead of fixing the systems creating the mismatch.

  
  

The technology may work.

But the process is still wrong.

Automation is incredibly powerful.

But it shouldn't be the starting point of every improvement project.

Sometimes the best process to automate is the one you have just eliminated.