Process automation in Sabadell almost never starts with a spreadsheet of saved hours. It starts with a scare: the person in the back office says she is retiring next year and somebody realises nobody else knows how to close the month.
Big-company processes, a three-desk office
Sabadell has 14,775 general-scheme social security registrations in workplaces with ten to forty-nine employees, according to the municipality in figures portal at Idescat. That bracket is exactly where this article happens: companies with real clients, suppliers, deadlines and accounts, but with an office of three or four people where each one runs their whole patch. And it is not a local quirk: in the Spanish business directory at the INE the vast majority of companies have fewer than ten employees.
That is not disorder. It is the opposite: an organisation that works so well it has turned invisible. The trouble comes the day someone has to explain it.
How to spot a process that lives in one head
One sign never fails: you ask how something is done and the answer is not a procedure, it is a name. «Montse takes care of that.» Three more, subtler ones:
- When that person is on holiday the work is not shared out: it is postponed.
- Nobody can say how long it takes, because nobody else has ever done it.
- There are steps written down nowhere that only surface when they go wrong.
Careful with the easy reading: that person is not the problem. She is usually the best worker in the place, and she is fast precisely because she knows it by heart. The problem is that the process does not exist outside her.
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How a process is taken out of a head
This is the work we do before programming anything, and it needs a notebook more than a computer.
Watch it, do not ask about it
If you ask, you get the tidy version: five steps, one after another. If you sit next to someone for a morning, out come the eight exceptions that are the real process: the client who pays up front, the supplier who sends no delivery note, the month with a bank holiday in the middle. Those exceptions are what breaks off-the-shelf automation.
Separate the decision from the task
Almost every process mixes two things: deciding and doing. Deciding whether this client gets served without paying up front is judgement, and it stays with the person. Copying the details from the email into the system, creating the folder, sending the notice and filing the PDF is a task, and that is what gets automated.
Write it in five lines
If the process does not fit in five lines it is almost always two processes squeezed into one, and it is worth splitting them before touching anything. Those five lines are, as a bonus, the manual that never existed.
Start with the boring stretch
You do not need to automate the whole process. Removing the copy-and-paste stretch already wins half of it, and that piece takes days to build. The rest is decided with the process running, not in a meeting.
Three processes that here almost always sit with one person
Onboarding a new client
Collect the details, check the tax number, create the record, open the folder, send the contract, tell whoever sold the job. Six steps in four different places, all of them in the head of the person who has been doing it for nine years. Automated, it is one form that creates the record, the folder and the notice in a single go.
The order to the supplier
«The usual one» hides a rule nobody ever wrote down: what to order when three are left, what to order in full and what to order only if there is an installation next week. The judgement stays; checking stock, building the order and sending it does not.
The month-end close
Reconciling payments, reviewing what is outstanding, preparing what goes to the accountant. It is the process we most often find in a single brain, and the most expensive one the day it is missing, because the information exists but is split between the bank, the system and one person's private spreadsheet.
What we do not automate
A broken process does not get automated: it gets fixed and then automated, because otherwise all you achieve is making the same mistake faster. Nor does anything done twice a year, where maintaining the automation costs more than doing it by hand. Nor the part where somebody has to look a client in the eye. And we do not automate to push anyone aside: it is done so that person stops being a bottleneck and can spend time on what only she can do.
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Succession, sick leave and passwords
Sabadell has plenty of second and third generation companies. When the next generation walks in they find a company that works and no manual at all, and that mix is uncomfortable: changing something without knowing why it was done that way is the best way to break it.
Part of this is a security matter too. In many small offices the access to the bank, the invoicing software and the email lives in the head —or the notebook— of a single person. INCIBE, the Spanish cybersecurity institute, publishes access control guidance for companies and it is cheap reading: everyone with their own user, leavers revoked and nothing depending on a shared password is not red tape, it is being able to keep working on Monday.
Documenting and automating do the same job by two different roads: they leave a written record of what happens, when and who does it.
The absence test
Before hiring anyone, a test that costs a day and no money. Pick a Thursday and act as if that person were not there: she answers no questions, even sitting right next to you. Write down every time somebody would have gone to ask her something, and what they wanted.
By the end of the day you have two things: the list of processes that depend on one person and the order to tackle them in, which is the most repeated one first. That is exactly where we start. If you would rather have a general method, we set it out in process automation: where to start.
What process automation in Sabadell costs
It goes by project, with a closed written quote, and it depends on how many steps the process has and what software it has to talk to. You start with one, put it to work and only then decide the next one; on process automation we explain how we work. The published monthly prices, from 100 to 1,500 euros plus VAT, are for web and digital presence and are billed separately.
The sum we do with the client is simple: how many hours a month go into the mechanical stretch and what that hour costs in your company. If the number does not add up, we say so. And if the process asks for something bigger than a few connections, then we are talking about custom software, which in this city is mostly a matter of firms with case files.
A note on grants: process management is one of the categories in the Kit Digital catalogue. If the call opens again, part of this can be paid with the voucher; on the waiting list we look at it with your case in hand.
Three signs at three months
How many times that person has had to answer a question that was not a decision: it should drop a lot, and her calendar shows it. How long a new client onboarding now takes from start to finish. And how many repeated mistakes have gone: the duplicate, the notice that never went out, the order that arrived late. If all three look the same at month three the build is wrong and we fix it; that is what the follow-up is for.
Who builds it, and from where
We are in Palamós and we have worked with companies in the Vallès for years. The first visit can be at your office; the build and the maintenance run remotely and support answers the same day. Tell us which process you would be afraid to lose and we will tell you whether it can be taken out of that head, how long it would take and what we would need from you.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.