The requirements for process automation fit into a single afternoon

Ask a managing director why the automation idea has not moved, and the answer is rarely money. It is homework. The master data is a mess, nobody has documented the processes, there is no requirements spec, and IT is busy. So the idea waits for a tidier day that never arrives.

None of that homework is needed. The actual process automation requirements are a short list: access to the systems involved, a batch of real cases, and one person who is allowed to decide. There is also a data processing agreement, and we bring that. Most companies can pull the list together in an afternoon. Once it is on the table, things move quickly. We build an agent in one to two days, and the test with real cases runs in the same week.

Process automation requirements you can cross off

Start with what does not belong on the list.

Process documentation is the first thing to go. Hardly any mid-sized company has its order entry written down, and that is fine. The process lives in the heads of the people who do it every day, and that is where we pick it up. Sophera Consulting does not run a separate process mapping project. It is part of selection, the first of our three steps: selection, quote, pilot.

You do not need a requirements spec either. What gets built is described in the quote, and we write that, cost-benefit analysis included.

Clean master data is not a condition. Your staff cope with duplicate customer numbers and three spellings of the same item today. An agent built for your company is built and tested on exactly that data. It does not assume a perfect version of it.

That leaves the IT project with a steering committee and a project plan. You can skip it. Your IT is needed for two logins, and we will get to those in a moment.

What remains is easiest to show with a worked example.

A worked example from wholesale

Suppose a fastener wholesaler receives a large share of its orders by email. Two people in inside sales retype them into the ERP. The managing director wants that to change: the agent reads the email and creates the order as a draft, inside sales approves it. We made this company up. The list behind it is the one we really need.

Two logins, two tickets to IT

The agent has to read order emails and create orders, so it needs two accounts. In the example, the person responsible for IT, employed or external, sets up read access to the mailbox where orders arrive. The second account is a dedicated user in the ERP with permission to create draft orders. Whoever manages users there takes care of it, and often that is the same person.

That is two tickets. The one thing to watch is that both accounts belong to the company and do not hang off an employee's personal login, otherwise the agent stops the day she moves to another department. You do not have to work out which permissions are needed. We settle that together beforehand in the Automation Check, and afterwards your IT knows what to set up.

If the ERP vendor has to enable the interface first, that goes into the same conversation. Usually it is one phone call to the vendor.

Twenty real emails, including the awkward ones

An agent is built and tested on what actually arrives, which is why we ask for real order emails and not a tidy sample. In the example, the head of inside sales spends half an hour in the mailbox and forwards 20 emails from the past few days.

The selection is useful when it looks like a normal day. A good half are plain orders with part numbers and quantities. The rest are the ones that make inside sales sigh. An order sent as a scanned PDF with a handwritten note in the margin. The regular customer who writes nothing but "same as last time, plus 200". An email that uses the customer's own name for the product, say "the long heavy-duty anchors", with no part number anywhere. A delivery that should go to the construction site and not to the address on file. A message that starts as an order and ends as a complaint. And one that is not an order at all but a price enquiry.

Those are the valuable ones. They show on day one what the agent handles alone and what it puts in front of inside sales with a question attached. Pick only the clean emails and you get an agent that shines in the test and trips over the first site address the following Monday.

You do not have to sort or label anything. Forwarding is enough. The list of special cases comes out of the emails during the build.

One person who decides

Every process has points where someone decides from experience today. Those decisions need to be said out loud once so the agent can follow them. Nobody from outside can do that, and it does not take a working group. It takes one person who runs the process daily and has the authority to settle things. In the example that is the head of inside sales. The managing director is too far from the daily work, and so is IT.

On the build day she will hear questions like these:

• An order arrives without a customer number, but the sender is clearly a known customer. Create it or ask?
• The customer orders 480 pieces and the packaging unit is 500. Round up, ship exactly, or check back?
• The item has been discontinued and there is a successor. May the agent put the successor into the draft?
• The requested date is earlier than the usual lead time. Create the draft anyway and flag it?
• Who receives the agent's questions, and who covers for that person during holidays?

None of them is hard. She answers each in seconds, because she answers them every day already, just silently. Her effort comes down to being available on the build day, ideally sitting at the table. We build an order intake from customer emails in a few hours, and with one person from the department it is live within a day.

Your own part as managing director is small here, but it is yours. Name the person and tell her explicitly that she may decide. That is all it takes.

The data protection agreement comes from us

Order emails contain names and addresses, which makes them personal data. We bring the data processing agreement, it is standard with us. Processing is GDPR-compliant and runs on European infrastructure. If you would rather not let the data leave the building, the models can run locally on your own hardware. What is left for you is a signature.

What the short list buys you

Add up the afternoon in the example. Two tickets to IT. Half an hour of the head of inside sales for 20 emails. Your call on who decides. One signature under the data processing agreement.

In return an agent is running after one to two days, and you test it with real orders in the same week. You get it for a fixed price with no subscription, and the result belongs to you. A maintenance agent that monitors operation is included in the fixed price. The only running cost is model usage, billed directly to you. We have broken down how the cost comes together in a separate article.

Depending on the process, we save 20 to 80 percent of the process cost. In the example that mostly means the two people in inside sales get their time back for the work they were hired to do: advising customers, chasing quotes, answering the phone.

Our recommendation

Do not wait until your company is "ready". It already is. If you have a process that eats hours every day and two systems someone can log into, you have nearly met the requirements. Which process makes a good start and which access we need for it is something we settle with you in the free Automation Check. After that you know what is on your list, you put it together in an afternoon, and Sophera Consulting builds.