Two years ago we automated the weekly depot performance pack. An analyst had been spending a day and a half each week assembling it from four systems, and we replaced her work with a job that produced a tidy PDF and emailed it at six every Monday morning. It was one of the projects I mentioned in my annual review.
This spring I sat with the finance business partner for operations to understand a discrepancy, and watched her copy figures from that PDF into her own spreadsheet, one depot at a time. She had done it every Monday since the pack was automated. So, it turned out, had somebody in operations planning, who fed the figures into a labour model, and an account manager who rebuilt four pages of it for our largest customer's quarterly review.
Together they spent about nine hours a week retyping what our job had typeset. The analyst we had freed up had saved about twelve. And the retyping introduced errors of its own, including a transposed figure in a customer review that took an uncomfortable meeting to explain.
We had measured the automation at our own boundary. The pack was produced on time, correctly, with no human involved, and by every measure we held it was a success. What happened to it after it arrived was outside our view and outside our metrics, and the manual work had not disappeared. It had moved downstream into three departments that did not think of it as a problem, because to them it was simply how the Monday pack worked.
The figures behind the pack are now published as a table that finance, planning and the account team pull directly into their own models. The PDF still goes out, and its readership turns out to be the regional managers, who read it on their phones and would not want anything else. Any automation proposal we accept now includes a line for what the recipient does next with the output, and somebody from my team goes to watch it happen before we build anything.
An automation ends where somebody stops needing to touch the result. Ours had ended where we stopped being able to see it.
– Serguey Shinder
