A 5-part series to share some warning signs and explore how automation may help. Part 3 of 5: Are your people making too many mistakes? (Maybe they can’t help it) Mistakes can happen when employees need to manually key in data, match records together, or need to manually track or transform data for your organization. Any piece of data that must be entered manually has the potential to be entered incorrectly. These mistakes can multiply when your company’s workflow requires several steps in sequence including multiple touches by imperfect people.
For executives managing sales and operations, it can be very frustrating when you are trying to eliminate order mistakes, but they keep happening. You can dive deep into root cause analysis, even hire a consultant to draw you a Pareto diagram of your problem, but in most cases you’re going to keep making these same mistakes until you find a smarter way. For instance, you may have a list of shipping codes, and whenever someone inadvertently transposes a shipping code, an order gets messed up. (In this case, your current system is subject to human error until you automate this code to remove the possibility that your employee can make this mistake.)
I’ve seen employees bending over backwards to keep from making mistakes, like double- and triple-checking their work, which causes them added stress and hurts their productivity. In other cases, your dutiful employees may feel like they are “holding it together,” having to manage information themselves simply because “the system” has limited formats and employees must act as a bridge of information to ensure the best service. Without updating the supporting IT systems to better help the humans, the humans are forced to remember all the new rules and procedures and their job gets
harder. They make mistakes and they really can’t help it. Even more frustrating, you now have competitors with newer systems designed for today’s workflows who don’t have these challenges.
In our next article, we ask an important question which can help identify hidden opportunities for business automation:
Are you “hitting a wall” or having trouble scaling your business? (Let’s talk)