The more I look at print businesses, the more I see nothing but a series of processes that get repeated daily using a set of tools (mostly software) and a set of humans. There are repeating processes everywhere, with the humans generally insisting that everything is somehow special (non-standard). In every print business, the jobs have to travel from initial inquiry to invoice. That is a repeating process. Just because one job in a thousand requires an extra step in accounting does not make the process “non-repeating.”

There are some good buzzwords for what I’m talking about in this article—business process automation, process workflow automation—but I will avoid all of them. I want the reader to believe that they could go into their conference room right after reading this article and document some of their repeating processes with a marker and some PostIt notes. You don’t have to know any business school lingo. You just have to know your business (maybe invite some of your team in) and you have to know how to write legibly.

I have some helpful hints on this process because I’ve run into lots of resistance and roadblocks when trying to do this within print businesses. I think there’s a human resistance to actually documenting what people do all day because that might give management the idea they don’t need as many people. This is a fear you have to deal with but the reality of it is this: what you want is to build a more efficient business so that your current team can manage more customers, more orders, and more revenue without adding headcount or working 80 hours per week.