People vastly underestimate manual processes.
A properly optimised, trimmed, practiced manual process can be executed much more cheaply than most people think.
What's the point? Flexibility. Humans are amazing at adapting to circumstances that invalidate portions of the process. In a fast-changing world, this is critical.
Really solid automation is notoriously expensive to set up, and about as expensive to change when the circumstances fundamentally change. When, not if. (You can usually still scrape by on an old automated process that's no longer relevant, but you're leaving oodles of value on the floor.)
Why do people underestimate manual processes? They usually don't know how to optimise them (hint: it involves restructuring things you think of as outside the process in question) so they associate manual with inefficient and expensive.
When you have a time-tested optimised manual process, it might not even make economic sense to automate it. But if it does, you don't have to do it all at once. You can start by automating the dumbest, simplest, most tedious, and most stable step of the process first.
Then you can continue to introduce automated steps only for as long as it makes economic sense to do so.
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Another common complaint about manual processes is that they invite mistakes. I have three things to say on that:
- There are ways to mistake-proof manual processes. "Poka-yoke" is a good starting word for googling.
- Automated processes make mistakes too. The difference is that an automated process makes mistakes more consistently. (Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on context.)
- Manual processes can avoid mistakes that are about to happen. In fact, I'd argue this happens at about the same rate as mistakes are made.