How do I know if my process is worth automating?
Short answer
Four things disqualify a process, and you can check all four yourself before talking to anyone. The slow step belongs to someone outside your company. The process is mid-rewrite. The people running it will not delegate the decision. Or the volume is too low to ever pay back the build. Everything else is a candidate.
The four things that disqualify a process
Wait-dominated upstream. Time the steps. If the long pole is waiting on a regulator, a customer signature or a payment to clear, automating your internal steps moves nothing — the wait is outside your control and it will still be there afterwards.
Mid-rewrite. If an ERP migration, a reorg or a new compliance regime is going to change this process within a couple of quarters, automating the current version locks in something that will not exist. Wait for the new shape.
Adoption blocker. Ask who signs off today and whether they would let software do it. A controller approving an outgoing wire, a doctor signing a referral — the automation works technically and then nobody uses it. That is a wasted build, not a slow one.
Volume too low. This one is arithmetic, and it is the next section.
The payback arithmetic you can do yourself
Three numbers: how many times a week the process runs, how many minutes it takes each time, and the loaded hourly cost of whoever does it — salary plus benefits, not the raw hourly rate. Multiply them. That is what the process costs you per week.
A worked example of a no. The process runs 8 times a week and saves 90 minutes each time: 12 hours a week, about $1,440 a month at $120 loaded. Against a six-month build the recovery line never crosses, and that is before anyone maintains it.
Do the same sum with pessimistic inputs — time saved at the low end of your own week-to-week range, build cost at the high end of the estimate. A process that still clears is worth a real conversation. One that only clears under optimistic numbers is the one that fails six months in.
What a free check gets you, and where it stops
A readiness check costs nothing anywhere competent, and ours takes fifteen minutes with no access to your systems. It answers exactly one question: is this process worth investigating properly. That is the right size of commitment for that question.
What free cannot give you is the number you would sign a build against. Throughput and error rate per handoff, a cost-of-chaos figure your controller stands behind, a signed ROI estimate — that needs five days and real access to your systems, and it is paid work, refundable in full if the audit ends in a no-build.
The failure mode to avoid is the opposite of being careful: paying four or five figures for a discovery phase that ends in a document, refunds nothing and builds nothing.
Related questions
Can I do this without talking to a vendor at all?
Yes, and you should do it first. Time the steps of one workflow for a week, write down how often it runs and who touches it, then run the four disqualifiers above. Most processes that fail do so on a criterion the team already suspected. Bring a vendor the ones that survive.
What counts as too low a volume?
There is no universal line, because it depends on the loaded cost of who is doing the work and on how long the build takes. The test is the arithmetic, not a threshold: if hours saved per week times loaded cost does not clear the build price inside a year at pessimistic inputs, it is too low.
Our process is changing next quarter. Should we wait?
Usually yes, for that process. Automating a workflow that is mid-rewrite means building against a shape that will not exist, and the second build costs more than the first because now there is something to unpick. Pick a different candidate that is stable, or wait for the new process to settle.
Is the free check just a sales call?
It is fifteen minutes and it can end in "do not automate this yet" — about one engagement in three ends at the audit stage that follows it. What it will not do is produce the quantified artifacts; those need real access and are paid work.
If the four disqualifiers did not rule your process out, the fifteen-minute check puts a first number on it. No access to your systems required.
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