“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Bill Gates

Someone asked me today: “…isn’t automation optimization?”. The answer is: NO.

Automation is accomplished by tooling. Optimization is accomplished by humans.

Only a human can look at a set of tasks and put them in a logical and sequential order to accomplish an objective i.e. only a human can say it takes these sequential 20 steps, 8 hours, and 4 people to build a wagon. Only a person can build a process.

Continuing, only humans can do process optimization i.e. looking at the process end-to-end and determine if we reorder step 3 and 4, combine step 6 and 9, and run steps 11 and 12 in parallel, we can eliminate unnecessary effort - then it will only take us 16 steps, 4 hours, and 3 people to do build the wagon. That’s called improvement, reduction and savings.

If a process cannot be done right manually then is reasonable to assume that the process cannot simply be improved by automation. So the answer remains a no, automation does not mean optimization.

Automation is tooling: software, robots, etc. Its objective is to ensure that the steps of process dictated by humans are automatically executed the same way every time and hopefully much faster. If automation is done correctly there is a digital trail of when a task starts and ends. This will then provide the owner of the process a trend of information that can he or she can use to assess and implement even more optimization.

When somebody tells you that the tool is not working start the troubleshooting with this question first: what is this tool being programmed to do? There is a very high probability that the problem is not the tooling but in fact it is the process the tool is automating.

One thing that people often forget is that - processes change. And they change often. If your process changes every 90 days then your automation tooling must be capable of supporting this high rate of change. In this case automation is almost a requirement.

I think it is fair to say that your tooling must be as agile as your processes are. A failure of either is a failure of both. But knowing the difference is the key to success.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 11:45 am and is filed under ITIL Metrics for Business Process Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.