Which Processes Should Your Business Automate First?
A Practical Guide for Enterprise Teams
Start simple. That’s what most businesses do when they begin the automation of processes. That approach is logical, but it carries a real cost. Your first automation project sets expectations for everything that follows. If it delivers a clear, visible improvement, you build support for the next one. If it delivers very little, the whole programme becomes harder to fund and harder to sell internally.
There is a practical cost too. Automating in the wrong order often means building workflows that later have to be rebuilt, because an earlier process was never addressed. Time spent early on the wrong candidate is rarely recovered.
Choosing well at the start is not about being cautious. It is about making sure your first result is strong enough to earn the second project. How do you make that choice? That’s what this guide will set out to answer.
The four signs a process is ready to automate
Before choosing any process, check it against these four signs. A process that meets all four signs is ready. A process missing two or more usually needs work first.
- It happens often. A process that runs hundreds of times a month returns far more value than one that runs twice a year, even if the second one feels more painful when it happens.
- The rules are clear. You can describe what should happen at each step, who approves what, and what to do when something is rejected. If the answer depends on who is handling it that day, the rules are not clear enough yet.
- The delay is visible. People can tell you where the process gets stuck and roughly how long it waits there. This matters because it gives you a number to measure against once the workflow is live.
- It impacts more than one person. Automation delivers the most value where work is handed between people or departments. A task that one person completes alone is usually better solved with a simpler tool.
The five types of processes to prioritise first
Across our clients in Finance, Human Resources (HR), and Operations, five categories consistently deliver the strongest early results.
- Approval and sign-off chains. Purchase requisitions, budget approvals, expense claims, and contract sign-offs. These are the clearest candidates because the delay is easy to measure and the improvement is immediately obvious to everyone involved.
- Data entry and document generation. Any process where the same information is typed into more than one system, or where a document is assembled by hand from data that already exists. This is where errors are most common and most expensive to correct.
- Cross-departmental handoffs. Work that moves between Finance and Operations, or between HR and Information Technology (IT). These handoffs are where requests most often go quiet, because no single team owns the whole process.
- Compliance and audit reporting. Anything you need to prove later. Automating these processes creates the record as the work happens, rather than requiring someone to reconstruct it at the end of the quarter.
- Employee requests. Leave applications, IT asset requests, travel bookings, and onboarding checklists. These are high volume, well understood, and affect employee experience.
The processes that are not ready yet
Some processes should wait. Automating them too early usually means locking a problem into software, where it becomes harder to fix than it was before.
Processes nobody agrees on
If two departments describe the same process or outcome differently, that disagreement needs resolving before anything is built. Automation will force a single version, and it is better to choose that version deliberately.
Processes that are about to change
If a regulation is being updated or a department is being restructured in the next few months, wait. Build once, against the new requirements.
Processes that only exist out of habit
Some approval steps have no owner and no purpose. They were added years ago for a reason nobody remembers. These should be removed, not automated.
The way to prepare any of these is the same: map the process properly first. Process mapping gives you a shared picture of how work moves today, which is what makes the disagreements and the redundant steps visible.
This is not a minor step. Deloitte’s Global Intelligent Automation survey has repeatedly identified process fragmentation as the single biggest barrier to scaling automation across an organisation – ahead of cost, skills, and resistance to change. Fragmentation happens when a process is not managed as one connected flow, but as a series of handoffs between teams and systems. Each handoff adds a chance for delay or error. Automating around that fragmentation rather than fixing it is what causes projects to stall at the second or third workflow.
Building a roadmap that grows with your business
A good automation roadmap is short and sequenced, not a list of everything you might eventually do.
Start with one process from the five categories above, ideally one that is contained within a single department. Build it, launch it, and measure the difference against the delay you recorded beforehand. That number becomes the case for your next project.
For the second and third projects, move outward rather than upward. Choose processes that connect to the first one, or that share the same approvers and the same systems. Each build then reuses what your team has already learned, and the workflows begin to connect into something larger.
Review the roadmap every quarter. Processes change, priorities move, and a workflow that was not ready six months ago may be ready now.
It also helps to agree in advance how you will measure success. Time saved is the most common measure, but it is not always the most persuasive one. Depending on the process, a reduction in errors, a faster response to customers, or a cleaner audit result may matter more to your leadership team. Choose the measure before you build, so the result is not open to interpretation afterwards.
Measurement is where many programmes quietly come undone. Gartner has found that while automation is a priority for around 90% of large enterprises, fewer than 20% have mastered measuring those initiatives.
Without a number to point to, even a successful project becomes difficult to defend at budget time.
How KUBE 365 supports a phased approach
KUBE 365 is a low-code business process automation (BPA) platform designed for exactly this kind of staged, practical rollout. You do not need to commit to automating everything at once, and you do not need a large technical project to start.
Workflows are built using a visual, drag-and-drop interface, so the teams who own each process can design it themselves. Once your first workflow is live, those same people can build the next one without waiting for external support. This is what makes a phased approach realistic rather than theoretical: the capability stays inside your business.
As your roadmap expands, the platform expands with it. New workflows connect to the ones already running, integrations with systems such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft 365 are configured once and reused, and every action across every process is logged automatically for audit purposes. One automotive group began with a single market and digitalised more than 100 processes across ten markets within twelve months, using this approach.
If you would like help identifying the right process to start with, speak to our team today. We can walk through your current workflows and suggest where the strongest first result is likely to come from.
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