Business automation takes the routine, rule-based work your team repeats every week, such as re-typing data between systems, chasing approvals, sending reminders or compiling the Monday report, and makes it run by itself. We build business process automation for UK businesses, connected to the software you already use, with a log that shows what ran and what didn’t.
The Rule That Decides Whether This Works
Define the process, remove the steps that shouldn’t exist, then automate what remains.
The middle step is the one that gets skipped, and it’s where most of the value is. Automating a process with four unnecessary steps keeps those steps forever and makes them faster, which isn’t the same as making the process better.
Writing down what happens, including the informal parts, usually shows that a good share of it exists for reasons that expired years ago. Finding that out is often worth more than the automation.
What We Automate
Most of our automation work falls into a handful of patterns.
Data moving between systems is the biggest. An order in the shop that someone re-keys into the accounts package, a signed quote that becomes a job and then an invoice, a new client who has to be set up in four places. Anything currently exported and re-typed is usually the largest time cost in the business and the most error-prone, and our API integration work is what connects the systems underneath.
Handovers come next. Work stalls when it moves between people, so the automation notifies the next person, assigns the task and escalates it if nothing happens.
Anything time-based is a good candidate too: reminders, renewal notices, payment chasers and follow-ups. People are unreliable at remembering these, and missed ones cost money.
Reports are the last common pattern. The weekly figures someone compiles from three systems every Monday can be assembled and sent on a schedule.
Automation We Run
We use the same approach on our own business. Every enquiry form on our website creates a lead in our own dashboard and alerts the team within seconds, and follow-ups go out on a schedule until someone qualifies the lead, at which point the sequence stops. Nobody copies an enquiry from an inbox into a spreadsheet.
For a lead-generation business we built the platform that distributes leads to buyers under each buyer’s own rules and prepaid credit, so no one has to allocate them by hand. It runs every day at volume.
What You Get
- A written map of the process as it runs today, exceptions and workarounds included
- A list of steps to remove before anything is automated
- The automation itself, built on connector tools or as custom code, whichever suits the volume and logic
- A log a non-technical person can read, showing each run and anything that failed
- Alerts when a run fails or a connected system stops responding
- A way for your team to pause it without calling a developer
- Documentation, so the automation doesn’t depend on the person who built it
Connector Tools or a Custom Build
Zapier, Make and Power Automate are often the right answer for a simple, low-volume flow, and we’ll say so when that’s the case. They get expensive when they’re charged per task at real volume, and fragile when the logic has many branches or the steps have to happen in a strict order. Past that point a custom build costs less over any reasonable period. Zapier vs a custom integration sets out where each one holds up.
If the process itself needs to live in software, with its own screens, approvals and records, rather than be stitched between tools, that’s a business workflow system.
What Isn’t Worth Automating
Judgement calls usually aren’t. Where the judgement is reading unstructured input, such as sorting emails or pulling fields out of documents, it’s a job for AI automation instead. Processes where the exceptions outnumber the standard cases are poor candidates, and so is anything done so rarely that building the automation costs more than doing the work.
The category people miss is the step that was never the bottleneck. Speeding up something that wasn’t holding anything up is the most common way this spend disappoints, and spotting it is a business question more than a technical one. If you’re still working out where to start, replace manual processes covers how to rank the candidates.
The Exceptions Decide Everything
Every real process has exceptions, and how they’re handled decides whether the automation survives contact with the business.
The failure looks like this. The automation handles the standard case, which is perhaps sixty percent of volume, and everything unusual falls into a gap nobody defined. Staff invent workarounds, the automation gets bypassed for anything awkward, and the business ends up running two processes, one of them invisible.
Mapping the exceptions before building prevents that. Ask the people who do the work rather than the person who manages it, because the workarounds live with them.
What Moves the Price
How well the process is documented matters most, because an undocumented process has to be discovered first. After that it’s the number of systems involved and whether they have usable APIs, then the number of exceptions and whether each one needs handling or can go to a person.
Volume affects the build-or-connect decision, since connector tools charge per task. And anything regulated needs an audit trail, which costs far more to add later than to build in from the start.
Where These Go Wrong
Automating an undefined process is the main failure, covered above. The second is having no visibility: an automation that has stopped working looks exactly like one with nothing to do, so failures go unnoticed for weeks.
Then there’s the inherited automation, assembled in a connector tool by one person who has since left, with no documentation. And automations with no off switch, where nobody can stop a bad run without a developer.
Questions to Ask Whoever Builds It
- Is our process written down, and did you read it or write it?
- What are the exceptions, and what happens to each one?
- How will we know it ran?
- What will it cost per month at our volume?
- Who can stop it, and how?
- What happens when a connected system is down?
Tell Us the Process
You don’t need a specification to start. Send us the process step by step, including the manual bits and the workarounds, with how often it runs, how long it takes now, which systems are involved and what the failure you most want to avoid looks like. Get in touch with the job your team does every week that nobody enjoys, and we’ll tell you which steps we’d remove before automating any of it.
