One of the primary reasons for investing in print business software is to make your print business more efficient. The buzzword that typically jumps into any conversation about efficiency is automation. Why do something better when you cannot do it at all—meaning have it done auto-magically via automation?

Efficient and automated are adjectives. An adjective requires a subject. The subject is always a business process. A business process is a series of steps you do repeatedly to achieve some outcome (for example, order processing, artwork approval, closing the month, etc.). You make a business process more efficient or automated. Everyone loves to talk about automation, yet we resist talking about the business process itself. I was on a call recently about “automation” and the very first thing out of every person’s mouth on the call was total automation as the goal. I get it. I wish I could fully automate lots of things in my business. The goal is valid. This conversation was about automating a process that was drastically changing because of the introduction of new software. So, I asked what I thought would be a reasonable question to the participants in the conversation: have you tried the manual process yet? I got a lot of pushbacks like I didn’t understand and was wasting their time. People started explaining to me again and again that their goal was automation. 

I also understand that you can’t get to a goal without understanding where the heck you are right now. It's like consulting a map. You want to get to a destination, but you must have a starting point. In the world of automated business processes, your starting point is the process as it stands right now. One of the other issues with my recent call was that there wasn’t anyone on the call who was participating in the current manual process! We can all learn from this experience; here are the first two learning points: