Business Process Automation Playbook

Introduction

Most businesses automate after the pain is unbearable. The smarter approach: identify high-volume, rule-based work early and systematically replace it — before it becomes a bottleneck.

Section 1: Identifying Automation Candidates

• Look for tasks done more than 10 times per week by the same person.
• Prioritise tasks with clear rules and no human judgement required.
• High-value targets: data entry, approval routing, report generation, status notifications.
• Map the full workflow before automating — don't automate broken processes.

Section 2: Selecting the Right Automation Approach

• Rule-based automation (Zapier, Make): for simple linear workflows between SaaS tools.
• RPA (UiPath, Automation Anywhere): for legacy system interaction without APIs.
• Custom code: for complex logic, bulk processing, or when cost matters at scale.
• AI-assisted: for classification, extraction, or decision support tasks.

Section 3: Implementation & Governance

• Start with one process end-to-end — don't automate in isolation.
• Build error handling and alerting from day one.
• Document every automation with owner, trigger, and fallback behaviour.
• Review automated workflows quarterly — business processes change.

Key Conclusion

“Automation compounds. Start small, prove value, then expand. The goal is not to eliminate people — it's to free them for work that matters.”