Find Out Which Manual Process to Automate First
An automation opportunity assessment ranks a business's manual processes by the effort they currently consume and the difficulty of automating each one, so a company with many candidate processes knows where to spend its automation budget first.
What an Automation Assessment Covers
This is for a business that suspects several processes are worth automating but has no ranked view of which one to start with. We look at the manual work actually happening - reconciliation, data entry, repetitive approvals, document matching - measure the effort it consumes today, and rank the candidates by what automating each would return against what it would take to build.
An FMCG Distributor's Reconciliation Pile
A wholesale FMCG distributor's staff spend a portion of every day matching supplier invoices against delivery notes and purchase orders by hand, while a separate team manually re-keys the same order data from a sales app into the accounting system. Both look automatable, but they are not equally worth doing first - one involves three-way matching against documents that vary in format supplier by supplier, and the other is a straightforward, structured data transfer between two systems that already expose the data cleanly. Ranking the two against effort saved and difficulty to build points clearly at which to fund first.
How Candidates Get Ranked
- How much staff time the process consumes today, measured rather than estimated from memory
- How structured the data involved already is, since consistent formats automate more easily than ones that vary
- How many systems the process touches, since each additional system adds integration work
- How much judgment the process currently requires from a person, since heavily judgment-based steps are harder to automate reliably
- What breaks, and how badly, if the automation gets something wrong - which sets how much oversight the automated version needs
What Drives Cost and Duration for This Assessment
How many candidate processes are being assessed and how many departments they span, since each process needs its own time-and-effort measurement rather than a shared estimate. Duration follows how quickly staff doing the work can be observed or interviewed, since the effort figures need to reflect what actually happens, not what a process document claims.
What You Hold at the End of the Assessment
A Ranked List of Candidates
Every process assessed, ordered by return against effort to build, so the first automation project is chosen on evidence rather than on whoever complained loudest.
A Difficulty Rating Per Candidate
What would make each process hard or easy to automate - data quality, system access, judgment involved - so the ranking is explainable, not just a number.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from just building the automation you think we need most?
This assessment comes before any build decision - it exists because which process is most worth automating is often not obvious from the outside, and getting the order wrong wastes budget on a process that was harder or less valuable than it looked.
What if every process we suspect is a candidate turns out to be hard to automate?
We say so, and rank them by relative difficulty rather than declaring the whole exercise a dead end. Some processes may need data cleanup or a system change before automation is realistic, and the assessment names that as a prerequisite rather than hiding it.
Does this include building the automation itself?
No. This is the assessment and ranking only. Building the top-ranked automation is a separate, subsequently scoped piece of work once you know which process to fund first.
What drives the cost of the assessment?
How many candidate processes are in scope and how many departments or systems each one spans, since every process needs its own measurement rather than a shared estimate across all of them.
What decides how long the automation assessment takes?
How quickly staff doing the manual work can be observed or interviewed, since accurate effort figures depend on watching the process happen, not on a written procedure that may no longer match reality.
Do we need clean data before this assessment can start?
No - assessing data quality is part of the exercise itself. Where poor data quality is what makes a process hard to automate, that finding is one of the outputs, not a precondition for starting.
What do you need from us to start the assessment?
A list of the processes you suspect are worth automating, access to the staff who perform them day to day, and sample extracts or screenshots of the systems each process currently touches.
Tell us what you need.
Send a short brief and one of our engineers will come back to you — usually the same day.
- No obligation
- We reply the same working day
- Your details stay private