Automation
Automating the work nobody admits is manual
Every operations team has a spreadsheet holding the company together. Finding it is most of the work of automation.
The processes that consume the most human hours are rarely the ones on the org chart. They live in a spreadsheet on someone's desktop, a saved email search, and a recurring reminder nobody questions.
Shadow the process before modelling it
We sit with the person doing the work and watch a full cycle. Not a description of it — the actual thing, including the parts they apologise for. The exceptions they handle by instinct are the requirements document.
Automate the spine, keep the joints human
The repetitive middle of a workflow — pulling records, reconciling fields, generating the document, filing it — automates cleanly. The judgment at either end usually should not. Systems that try to swallow the judgment produce work that has to be checked anyway, which is not a saving.
Measure the hours, then measure the errors
Time saved is the headline metric and the less important one. The durable win is that the reconciliation now happens the same way every time, so the error rate stops depending on who was on shift.