How to choose the first process to automate in a company

A good first process to automate repeats at least several times a week, can be described with clear rules and takes up people’s time, not their judgment. Choose a candidate that meets all three conditions at once — not the one that sounds the most modern. You can work out the score in a few minutes, and the result tells you where to start.

What are the criteria for a good first process?

Before you start counting, go through your candidates with four questions.

How often does the process happen? Daily or several times a week is a good sign. A process that runs once a month is rarely worth automating — the deployment won’t have time to pay back.

Can it be described with rules? Try writing it down as a sequence of steps: “when X arrives, check Y, record Z.” If you manage it, it’s a good candidate. If you find yourself tearing your hair out while describing it, because “well, it depends”, the process isn’t ready for automation yet — it needs simplifying first.

Does it take time rather than decision-making? Retyping orders from email into a system, sorting inquiries by type, extracting data from invoices, answering the same questions in support. These are processes where people lose time on mechanical work. Leave decisions that carry responsibility for a customer or for money to a person — the agent prepares the groundwork for them, not the verdict.

Does the process have a single owner? Someone who knows the process by heart and can say what happens in an exception has to be available during both the analysis and the pilot. Without this person, getting to know the process is slower and worse.

Which processes tend to be good candidates?

The same types of processes that meet these criteria recur across companies. This isn’t a list of recommendations to adopt blindly — it’s more a direction for where to look in your own company.

Retyping orders. From an email, a PDF attachment or a web form into the system where the order is processed further. It happens with every single order, has a clear form (items, quantities, address) and takes minutes each time, which adds up to hours over a month.

Processing invoices and documents. Extracting the amount, the variable symbol (the payment reference used in Slovakia), the supplier and the items from PDF or scanned invoices. The same field recurs on every document, just in a different layout depending on the supplier.

Sorting inquiries and support questions. Recognising what the customer is asking for and routing it to the right place, or answering the most frequent questions. The rules can be written down, because the questions repeat.

Reconciling data between systems. Warehouse, e-shop, accounting — when someone retypes the same numbers by hand from one system into another, that is exactly the kind of mechanical work that takes time, not judgment.

How do you score a process simply?

When you have several candidates, score each one from 1 to 5 in three categories and add up the total:

frequency (1 = once a quarter, 5 = several times a day)
+ clarity of rules (1 = depends on gut feeling, 5 = can be written as a procedure)
+ time the process takes (1 = a few minutes a month, 5 = hours a day)

The candidate with the highest total goes first. If there’s a tie, choose the one where you have the process owner ready — you’ll save yourself the first two weeks that would otherwise go on finding someone who can answer the questions.

Example: processing orders from email happens daily (5), can be described as a procedure — items, quantities, address, confirmation (4) — and takes an hour or two a day (4). Total 13. Preparing the monthly report for management happens once a month (1), the procedure is clear (5), but it takes half an hour (2). Total 8. Orders win, even though the report looks “more important”.

The score is deliberately rough — it isn’t meant to be scientific, only to decide between a few candidates without a long discussion. It’s enough for two or three people from the company to fill it in independently of each other and compare the results. If they agree on the order, the choice is made. If they diverge significantly on one candidate, it usually means they don’t yet describe the process the same way — and that in itself is a useful finding before the analysis.

What are the warning signs?

Some processes are worth leaving alone, at least for now.

The process changes every month. You’d be automating a moving target — by the time you finish the deployment, the rules are different. Wait until the process settles.

Five people describe the process in five different ways. Chaos can be automated, but then you have chaos that runs faster and nobody can stop. Unify the process first, then automate.

Decisions are made “depending on the situation”. When the process owner answers the question “what do you do when X happens” with “it depends”, the rules aren’t yet finished on paper, let alone ready for automation.

It touches money or security without a check. Not that it can’t be automated — it’s just that there always belongs a step where a person approves the output, until the tool has earned trust.

Nobody on the team is sure whether the process is still needed at all. Automating something that could simply be dropped or merged with another step is a more expensive route to the same goal. First ask whether the process needs to exist in its current form at all.

What comes after the choice

Once you have the candidate with the highest score, the next step isn’t development, but a process analysis — we name the process precisely, work out the saved work and the cost of deployment, and tell you after how long it pays back. It takes 3 days to a week and costs from €490 excl. VAT. If the numbers add up, an AI agent pilot follows on one process with measurement, from €2,900 excl. VAT.

Choosing the first process isn’t a one-off decision for years to come. Once the pilot proves itself, you apply the same criteria and scoring to the next candidate on the list — so the company gradually builds up an order of priority that can be revisited whenever something changes in operations. More important than a perfect first choice is having a clear and repeatable way of deciding.

You’ll also find the exact procedure for specific types of process in separate articles — for example how automating orders from email into the system works or what the difference is between AI automation and RPA.