Guide
What is worth automating, and what is worth keeping slow
Automation is a good answer to repetition and a bad answer to judgment. The distinction is easier than the pitch decks make it sound: automate the work that is identical every time.
- Worth automating
- Work that is identical every time and obvious when wrong
- Worth keeping manual
- Anything that spends money or reaches a client
- The test
- Would you notice within a minute if it went wrong?
The test
Automate what is identical, and obvious when wrong
Decorating the same logo across nine colorways is identical work with an obvious failure mode, so it is a good candidate. Deciding which nine products belong in a collection is different every time and fails quietly weeks later, so it is a bad one. Run any proposed automation through both halves of that test.
- Identical every time, or different every time?
- Would a mistake be visible in a minute, or in a month?
- If the answer is a month, keep a person in the loop
Good candidates
The repetition actually worth removing
Producing decorated imagery for every colorway. Re-stating prices with your margin applied. Rebuilding an order from the collection that was approved. None of those require judgment, all of them are slow by hand, and all of them are checkable at a glance.
- Decorated renders across every colorway of a product
- Applying your margin and pricing policy across a collection
- Carrying the approved assortment into the order without re-keying it
Keep it slow
The approvals that earn their friction
Publishing to a client, anything that charges money, and anything destructive are the three places where speed is worth trading away. In MerchMaker those go through a preview that shows the effects and the cost, and an admin authorises before it commits. That is a few seconds against a class of mistake that costs a relationship.
- Preview the effects and the cost before committing
- An admin authorises; the authorisation is single-use and expires
- People without the role can request one rather than be stuck
Order of operations
Fix the artefact before you fix the process
Teams tend to start by automating internal steps, which makes the same deliverable arrive sooner. The bigger change is usually the deliverable itself: a link with decorated products, honest prices and real minimums gets a decision faster than any amount of internal speed.
- Start with what the client receives, not with your inbox
- A faster path to the same weak artefact is still a weak artefact
- Internal automation pays off once the output is worth sending
Questions
What is the first thing to automate?
The decorated imagery, because it is identical work per colorway and wrong output is obvious on sight. It is also the part clients notice.
Should approvals be automated away?
No. Publishing, spending and deleting are exactly where a few seconds of friction is cheap insurance. MerchMaker keeps a preview-and-authorise step on all three.
Does this need a big change programme?
Not really. Changing the artefact you send a client is one workflow, and it is the one with the shortest path to a different outcome.
See the logo on the product first.
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