22/10/2026

Make human work as painless as possible

Sometimes I do ‘internal automation consults’. That means going onsite for a few hours and shadowing the work humans do on a computer.

We primarily find tasks and workflows to automate; however, one of my secondary goals is to make work easier for those humans. The best example is data entry: if your factory manager (his name is Morris) is entering a whole bunch of production data as free text into your ERP at the end of every day, you can simplify this by emailing Morris a form that has pre-populated options. Currently, Morris opens his PC, kills two minutes opening and logging into the ERP, and another 20 minutes locating each different job, stage and station to log data. Imagine how much better the data would be if he filled out a form with a pre-populated list of jobs and stages. Morris simply selects the relevant job (thereby removing the possibility for typos and bad data), enters his quantities and submits the form.

Sometimes there aren’t full-on workflows that jump out at you to automate. Your business might have every workflow automated well already. But have a think about how you can make somebody’s computer work more painless.

-Fred