12/10/2026

Automate to eliminate errors

When humans are doing computer work, errors are always going to happen. You could have on your team the best order keyer in the world (they won the Order Keying Championship the last five years in a row). They’re still going to make mistakes. They might make no mistakes for six months then 10 mistakes in a day. It’s not their fault; they’re human and they didn’t intend to make mistakes, they simply misclicked or got distracted or a coffee spilled on their keyboard and something submitted without them knowing.

Therein lies the problem: you can’t plan for errors. Wouldn’t it be great if you could? Slack message to the whole company on Monday - “On Thursday at 11am, Kirsty is going to key an order with an missing digit in the freight cost field. Please can somebody set a task to fix this following the order entry.” … you get my point. Errors, especially when left undetected, can result in anything from one minute wasted on fixes to completely crippling a company, and you have no idea when they’re going to happen.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there’s a fix: automate the tasks where you see the most errors. Alongside saving a whole bunch of time and money, all mistakes and all follow-up and headaches as a result of those mistakes are eliminated overnight. I will give a disclaimer: programs and automations still make errors, but they’re logical. An error might have happened because a filter wasn’t comprehensive enough. You fix the filter and the error never happens again. A human makes an error, you tell them not to, and there’s a chance they make the exact same error immediately.

Think about stuff you fixed last week as a result of humans making mistakes on computers. Let us know what it is, and we’ll let you know if it can be automated.

-Fred