When business leaders decide to automate, the instinct is to move fast. The technology is available now, competitors are talking about what they’re building, and a large initiative seems like the right response to the size of the opportunity.

So you start big. The plan spans multiple departments and dozens of processes, with outside developers building all of it at once. The budget gets approved, and the work spreads across the company before any single piece has proven itself. A year later, the initiative gets scrapped, the budget spent and nothing working to show for it.

Instead of starting everywhere at once, it’s more useful to pick one process and automate that. Get it running, then let what you learn direct what comes next. Going slow this way runs counter to the urgency, but twelve months in, the business will have several automations running, a team that knows how to identify the next one, and better documentation than it started with.

Pick One Process to Automate First

It’s probably not hard to identify a good candidate for your first automation. It’s the one where work piles up and waits, the one people email about three times to find out where things stand, the one where the same numbers get keyed into two systems because the two systems don’t talk to each other.

Invoice approval routing is a common example, because it usually shows all of those signs at once. Invoices arrive by email, someone enters the information, routes each one for approval, follows up with the people who haven’t responded, and enters the information again in the accounting system. Everyone involved can tell you it takes too much time and gets stuck too often.

Documenting the Process Makes It Stronger

Related: Read how we helped Quiddity improve their business with automation

The people doing the work see things you can’t from where you sit. They know the step that exists only because a form gets printed and rescanned, the approval that waits two days because it routes through someone who’s rarely at their desk, the part of their week that goes to chasing updates that could send themselves. That knowledge comes out when they help map the process that’s about to be automated, because it’s the first time the whole thing gets written down and every step gets questioned.

The person handling client intake wonders why file setup and account creation still take an afternoon. The operations manager looks at the report assembled by hand at the end of every month. Someone on the service side questions how incoming requests get triaged and assigned.

Writing the process down is where the unexamined steps get exposed. A step survives because of a system replaced four years ago. An approval routes to someone who left the company. Nobody remembers why, and the only answer anyone has is that we’ve always done it this way.

That’s when people start asking why. Why are we doing it this way, and what would be better? The business comes out of it with a stronger process, and the automation gets built on the improved version instead of the inherited one.

Related: How to find opportunities for business process automation

One Process at a Time Is the Path to Success

Start with one process and you get a result you can measure, a team that knows where automation belongs, and a better process, not just an automated one. Each project makes the next one easier to identify and faster to build, and that’s a place a single large initiative can’t take you.

This is how we work with clients at XPERTECHS. We help you choose a first process, document what it does, build the automation, and manage it as your business changes.

When we also manage your IT environment, the automation gets built by people who already know your systems, your security configuration, and how everything connects. Integration becomes part of the build rather than a problem to solve afterward, and when your infrastructure changes, we know what depends on it and what has to change with it.

Deciding where automation fits in your business is a strategic call. We have a proven approach that leads to success, and our team can help you apply it. Contact us to schedule a meeting.