The retyping test: how to find what to automate first
A simple test for Ugandan businesses deciding what to automate: find what gets retyped, chased or rebuilt by hand every week, and what each hour of it costs.
There is a simple test for whether a business is ready for automation, and it does not involve any software. Sit in the office for one normal day and write down three things: what gets typed into a second system after it was already typed into a first, what gets chased by phone call because nobody was reminded, and what gets rebuilt in a spreadsheet every week or month from numbers that already live in a system.
That list, with a rough hour count against each line, is the whole business case. Most offices we walk through lose staff-hours every day to work a machine should be doing, and the people losing those hours know it better than management does. Ask the person who does the invoice run.
We apply the test to ourselves, because our own website is a small business with the same problems. When somebody books a demo on our site, the reminder before the appointment is sent by the system, not by somebody remembering. When a payment comes in by mobile money, a nightly job reconciles it against the payment provider's records rather than a person ticking rows. When an email cannot be delivered, it queues, retries, and expires with a record, instead of a staff member re-sending and hoping. None of that is clever. It is the same three categories from the test: reminders, reconciliation, retyping.
What makes automation affordable now is that it almost never means replacing the systems you run. Your accounting package, your stock system and your messaging all have ways in and out, and the work is connecting them: when this happens here, do that there, and tell the customer on WhatsApp, because that is where your customers already are. The first automation should be the line on your list with the biggest hour count, built in weeks, and measured against the manual version it replaced. If it does not pay for itself, stop. If it does, it funds the next line.
The way we scope it — the mapping day, the written price, and the service levels the automation runs under — is at business process automation in Uganda.