How CrystalCommerce kept scarce inventory accurate across sales channels
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Method
Find your firstthree automations
Ten steps from “we should automate something” to three specific workflows with a cost against each. Nothing to register for. Work through it yourself, or bring the result of step three to the intro call.
The method
Ten steps, inthe order that matters
The order is not decorative. Costing a workflow before ruling out the ones that should not be automated produces a business case for the wrong thing.
01
Where to look
The four places in a mid-size company where recoverable time reliably hides, and the order to inspect them in. Start where work is re-keyed between two systems; that is almost always the largest and the least contested.
02
Which workflows not to automate
Low volume, unstable rules, contested ownership, or a process that needs changing rather than accelerating. Ruling these out first is what stops the exercise producing a list nobody will fund.
03
How to calculate process cost
Volume, time per item, loaded cost, rework and the cost of the error itself, including how to time a sample honestly rather than asking people to estimate from memory.
04
Where AI genuinely helps
Unstructured input, fuzzy classification, retrieval and drafting. Those four shapes are worth paying a model for. Most other things are not.
05
Where ordinary automation is better
Arithmetic, lookups, thresholds and validation. A rule you can write down should be code, because code is cheaper to run, easier to test and does not change its mind.
06
Assessing implementation complexity
What makes a workflow cheap or expensive to automate, and the questions that reveal it in ten minutes rather than in a discovery phase.
07
Calculating ROI properly
The eight terms, including the residual manual work and the ongoing run cost that most business cases omit and every real deployment has.
08
Launching safely
Confidence thresholds, human approval, running in parallel with the old process, and how to decide when it is safe to switch over.
09
Measuring the result
Choosing the KPI, capturing the baseline before you build rather than after, and what to watch for drift once the system has been running a few months.
10
A worked example
One order-entry workflow, mapped end to end, with the eleven opportunities it contained and which four were worth building first.
Go deeper
Four of these steps,written out in full
What is workflow automation? A practical definition for operations teams →
A plain-language guide to workflow automation: what it is, what it is not, where AI belongs, and how to choose the first process.
How to calculate whether an AI automation is actually worth building →
The arithmetic that decides it, including the two terms most ROI cases leave out and the reason recovered hours are not the same as saved money.
AI vs. traditional automation: when should you use each? →
A practical comparison of AI and deterministic software, including the inputs, decisions, costs and controls that decide which belongs in a workflow.
We mapped an order-entry workflow. Here are the 11 automation opportunities we found. →
One process, one afternoon of watching people work, eleven places where the business was paying for the same information to be handled twice.
The method, applied
Workflows somebodyactually mapped
CrystalCommerce COCOLI How COCOLI automated furniture supply across three European markets
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Tunelark How Tunelark connected lesson sales, scheduling and instructor payouts
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Fastyr AI How Fastyr turned an AI-agent vision into a coherent operating workspace
No baseline was captured on this engagement.
Read next
Everything elseon the method
Done step three?
Bring the three you found.We will tell you which to build.
With a rough cost against each, the intro call is enough to say which one repays a build first and which engagement builds it. The initial audit that follows is free, and the scope and the cost come to you in writing before anything is built.