Criteria for choosing a process
A good candidate for business process automation meets most of these criteria:
- Frequency. The process runs daily or weekly.
- Number of participants. Three or more people or departments — it’s in the hand-offs that time gets lost.
- Clear rules. Decisions are made under clear conditions, not “depending on mood”.
- Pain. The process regularly causes delays, mistakes or complaints.
- Measurability. You can count cycle time or the number of errors before and after.
Seven processes companies usually start with
1. Invoice and expense approvals
A classic: many participants, amounts and limits, the constant “who hasn’t approved yet?”. After automation, the cycle usually shrinks from days to hours.
2. Internal requests
IT, purchasing, business trip and leave requests. Instead of chat messages — a form, a route and a status the requester can see.
3. New employee onboarding
Access rights, equipment, documents, training courses and mentor meetings are triggered automatically from the moment of hiring. More in the article on employee onboarding.
4. Handling leads and deals
Distributing requests among sales reps, reminders, pipeline stages — the foundation of a CRM.
5. Contract approvals
Lawyer, finance, head of the business line — with document versions and comments in one place.
6. Regular reporting
Data that used to be collected by hand in spreadsheets is calculated by the system and shown on a dashboard.
7. Recurring tasks
Monthly checks, stocktakes, checklists in stores or production — tasks are created on a schedule.
Priority matrix
| Easy to automate | Hard to automate | |
|---|---|---|
| High impact | Start here: approvals, requests | Plan as a second stage: CRM, integrations |
| Low impact | Do it “along the way” | Postpone |
What not to automate first
- Processes the team doesn’t agree on how they should work.
- Rare processes (once a quarter) with complex logic.
- Creative tasks where every case is unique.
Such processes should first be optimised and the rules agreed.
How to launch your first process in 2–4 weeks
- Choose one process using the matrix and assign an owner.
- Describe “as is” and “to be” on one page.
- Build the process in the designer — in Folck this is done without a programmer.
- Run a pilot in one department and collect feedback.
- Compare metrics before and after — and move on to the next process.