Our Automated Report Arrived as a PDF and Three Teams Typed It Back In
Two years ago we automated the weekly depot performance pack. An analyst had been spending a day and a half each week assembling it from four systems, and we replaced her work with a job that produced a tidy PDF and emailed it at six every Monday morning. It was one of the projects I mentioned in my annual review. This spring I sat with the finance business partner for operations to understand a…
Two years ago, the weekly depot performance pack was automated, replacing a day and a half of manual work by an analyst assembling it from four systems. The automated system produced a tidy PDF and emailed it at six every Monday morning. Despite the automation, a discrepancy was discovered, prompting a review by Serguey Shinder with the finance business partner for operations.
It was found that three teams were still manually retyping figures into their respective systems, spending about nine hours a week on the task. This introduced errors, such as a transposed figure in a customer review, which had to be explained in an uncomfortable meeting. The automation had been measured within the system's own boundaries, but the manual work had moved downstream into three departments that did not recognize it as a problem.
The figures behind the pack are now directly pulled into models by finance, planning, and the account team, while the PDF itself is still sent out and read by regional managers on their phones. Automation proposals now consider the recipient's next steps with the output, with team members observing the process before implementation.
The automation ended where nobody needed to touch the result, a point Shinder emphasizes as crucial for the success of such initiatives.
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