Automation in Business

When running a business, or starting one, it is important to ask how many of the tasks that you do on a daily basis can be automated. Just think about all the tasks you work on, during the day, or week, and ask yourself if they could be replaced by a program or a template. Sometimes it is scary to think about how much of our work is repetitive, and can be replaced by a simple computer program.

This is an area I am thinking about at the moment. There is an area of the business that is essential to it, but could become a major time drain. It is also a task that is essential to the business, particularly during the start up phase. In my case, I am developing hardware that needs to interface to other equipment. When the product is first released, I am guessing that most new installations will need me to decode the protocols to talk to my customers equipment. Given that the first time I tried this task it took me the best part of a day to do, and it is a complex task, this could very quickly become a time drain.

That is where computers and software come in. I am currently working on automating this step, writing code to help me decode the interface. I am not there yet, but I am getting close. I am not sure I will ever get to the point where the entire process is automated, but I am hoping that in the end I will make this a process that will take no more than half an hour. Really, it depends on how much automation I want to put into this process. And how much I want to reduce the tedious repetitive work.

Which comes to a second point – sometimes it is better to make the software dumb, and force a low paid worker to go through every possible combination, rather than getting a higher paid worker spend brain power working things out, probably taking more time anyway. Sometimes brute force wins. But not always.