Why most automation initiatives stall before they start
The failure mode we see most often isn't technical — it's strategic. A leadership team decides to "automate," a working group is formed, six months pass, and nothing has shipped. The culprit is almost always the same: the team couldn't agree on where to start, so they tried to do everything at once, or they picked a process that sounded impressive but turned out to be too complex to be a first project. The answer is a structured automation opportunity assessment. Not a workshop with sticky notes, but a repeatable scoring framework that removes the politics from prioritisation and points you at the processes where automation will create the most value fastest.
The four dimensions of an automation score
Score each candidate process across four dimensions, each out of 10. Volume: how many times does this process run per week? A process that runs 500 times scores higher than one that runs 20. Cost per instance: what does each execution currently cost in staff time at loaded salary rates? Error rate and error cost: how often does this process produce errors, and what does each error cost to correct? Structural simplicity: is the process rule-based with clear decision logic, or does it require genuine judgment? Simple and rule-based scores high. Multiply the first three dimensions together and divide by the fourth (inverted — higher simplicity = lower divisor). The processes at the top of your ranked list are where you start. This approach consistently surfaces the same kinds of processes: invoice processing, data entry between systems, report generation, email triage, compliance document creation.
Running the assessment in practice
Schedule 30-minute interviews with team leads across Operations, Finance, Customer Success, and HR. Ask each person to list the five most repetitive tasks their team does. Don't ask what they'd like to automate — ask what eats time. Then run each candidate through the scoring matrix. In a typical mid-market business, this surfaces 15–25 candidate processes. The top 3–5 by score are your automation roadmap Year 1. The top 1 is your pilot. Pick it, build it, measure the impact, and use those results to fund the next three.
The processes you will almost always find at the top
Across more than 60 assessments, the same process types consistently score highest: purchase order processing and invoice matching against PO lines; new employee onboarding document collection and system provisioning; customer data entry from CRM to ERP and back again; scheduled compliance and regulatory reporting; order status update notifications to customers. If your assessment doesn't turn up at least two of these, you're either a very unusual business or you've already automated the obvious wins. In either case, the scoring framework will tell you — and that's the point.
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