Practical AI / GUIDE + WORKSHEET
Which business process should you automate first?
Prioritize automation candidates by repetition, process clarity, input readiness, and error impact with an interactive comparison tool.
THE STARTING POINT
Start with a frequent, well-understood process whose inputs are accessible and whose mistakes can be detected and corrected. Compare the effort removed with the effort of review and maintenance. A small, measurable workflow with an owner is often a more useful first experiment than a broad transformation project.
Describe a task, not an aspiration
Replace 'automate operations' with a specific event, action, and result: when a job is accepted, create a project draft with the agreed scope. Record who performs the task, how often it happens, and where time goes. Separate waiting for a decision from repetitive handling. An automation cannot remove a dependency merely by moving information faster.
Check readiness and consequences
Ask whether the process has a stable owner, clear rules, usable inputs, and a way to verify the result. Identify the cost of a wrong action and whether it can be reversed. A high-volume task may still be a poor first choice if its inputs are inconsistent or failures would be hard to spot. Process cleanup can be the first improvement.
Choose an experiment with a stopping rule
Define a limited scope, baseline effort, expected exceptions, and the evidence needed to continue. Include review and maintenance in the comparison. Use the prioritization tool as a conversation aid, then override its score when a mandatory constraint applies. Revisit the shortlist after observing a pilot rather than treating the first ranking as permanent.
WORKED EXAMPLE / ILLUSTRATIVE
A fictional first-project shortlist
The team compares report preparation with an autonomous pricing process. Reporting has stable inputs and a reviewer, so it makes a more manageable experiment here. This is a scenario, not a universal ranking of use cases.
| Candidate | Readiness | First step |
|---|---|---|
| Prepare a weekly report draft | Defined data and human review | Test a small reporting period |
| Send autonomous price changes | Ambiguous rules, consequential errors | Clarify policy and approval first |
| Copy accepted scope into a project | Stable trigger and fields | Test the handoff and exceptions |
COMPARE THREE IDEAS
Automation priority worksheet
Rate each factor from 1 to 5. This planning heuristic favors clear processes and usable inputs. It does not override a requirement, risk, or business judgment. Your entries stay in this page.
Score = 2 × repetition + 3 × clarity + 3 × input readiness + 2 × ease of correction. Possible range: 10–50. Scores are comparative prompts for discussion, not measured performance.
MAKE IT USEFUL
Automation opportunity brief
Define enough of the task to decide whether a pilot is worthwhile.
Your notes stay in this page and are not sent to Smithers. Download or copy them before leaving; refreshing clears them.
Before you put it to work
- Choose a bounded task.
- Include review and maintenance.
- Identify consequential failures.
- Record the evidence needed to expand.
The score below is a transparent planning heuristic, not an objective prediction of savings or success. An essential constraint can outweigh a high score.
IF THIS LOOKS FAMILIAR
Your tools. Your particular mess.
The worksheet is yours to use. If the difficult part is making it work with the systems you already have, that's the kind of thing we help with.