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Summary – Digitalizing an ambiguous or unnecessarily bloated process cements delays, errors, bottlenecks, and duplicate entries by locking in workarounds and blurred accountability. Field observation, real workflow mapping, and identifying friction points (duplicate entries, breaks in responsibility, redundant approvals), prioritized by business value, enable diagnosing before automating.
Solution: streamline and clarify steps and roles, standardize key tasks, and tailor automation to expected ROI.
In many organizations, digitalization is seen as a cure-all for recurring delays and errors. Yet if a process suffers from ambiguity, inconsistency, or unnecessary steps, introducing a digital tool only exposes and amplifies these flaws. Before deploying a solution, it is essential to decipher the operational reality: the workarounds, informal adjustments, and implicit dependencies arising from everyday work.
This article demonstrates why digitalizing a bad process can worsen dysfunctions, and how, through rigorous analysis, friction removal, and simplification, a true digital transformation becomes a lever for performance and reliability.
Understanding the Real Process Before Considering Digitalization
The first prerequisite for a successful digitalization is the rigorous observation of the process as it actually unfolds. This is not about relying on procedural theory, but on daily execution.
Field Observation
To grasp the gaps between formal procedures and actual practice, it is essential to observe users in their work environment. This approach can take the form of interviews, shadowing sessions, or log analysis.
Stakeholders thus collect feedback on workarounds, tips used to speed up certain tasks, and delays caused by ill-considered approvals. Each insight enriches the understanding of the true operational flow.
This observational work often reveals workaround habits that do not appear in internal manuals and that may explain some of the recurring delays or errors.
Mapping Workflows and Workarounds
Mapping involves charting the actual steps of a process, including detours and repetitive manual inputs. It allows visualization of all interactions between departments, systems, and documents.
By overlaying the theoretical diagram with the real workflow, it becomes possible to identify loops that cannot be automated without prior clarification. Mapping thereby reveals bottlenecks and breaks in accountability.
Example: An industrial company had deployed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to digitalize order management. The analysis revealed more than twenty manual re-entry points, particularly during the handover between the sales department and the methodology office. This example shows that without consolidating workflows, digitalization had multiplied processing times and increased the workload.
Evidence of Daily Practices
Beyond formal workflows, it is necessary to identify informal adjustments made by users to meet deadlines or ensure quality. These “workarounds” are compensations that must be factored into the analysis.
Identifying these practices sometimes reveals training gaps, coordination shortcomings, or conflicting directives between departments. Ignoring these elements leads to embedding dysfunctions in the digital tool.
Observing daily practices also helps detect implicit dependencies on Excel files, informal exchanges, or internal experts who compensate for inconsistencies.
Identifying and Eliminating Invisible Friction Points
Friction points, invisible on paper, are uncovered during the analysis of repetitive tasks. Identifying bottlenecks, accountability breaks, and redundant re-entries is essential to preventing the amplification of dysfunctions.
Bottlenecks
Bottlenecks occur when certain steps in the process monopolize the workflow and create queues. They slow the entire chain and generate cumulative delays.
Without targeted action, digitalization will not reduce these queues and may even accelerate the accumulation of upstream requests, leading to faster saturation.
Example: A healthcare clinic had automated the intake of administrative requests. However, one department remained the sole authority to approve files. Digitalization exposed this single validation point and extended the processing time from four days to ten, highlighting the urgent need to distribute responsibilities.
Accountability Breakdowns
When multiple stakeholders intervene successively without clear responsibility at each step, breakdowns occur. These breakdowns cause rework, follow-ups, and information loss.
Precisely mapping the chain of accountability makes it possible to designate a clear owner for each phase of the workflow. This is a crucial prerequisite before considering automation.
In the absence of this clarity, the digital tool is likely to multiply actor handovers and generate tracking errors.
Redundant Re-entries and Unnecessary Approvals
Re-entries often occur to compensate for a lack of interoperability between systems or to address concerns about data quality. Each re-entry is redundant and a source of error.
As for approvals, they are often imposed “just in case,” without real impact on decision-making. They thus become an unnecessary administrative burden.
Redundant re-entries and unnecessary approvals are strong signals of organizational dysfunctions that must be addressed before any automation.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Simplify Before Automating: Essentials for a Sustainable Project
First eliminate superfluous steps and clarify roles before adding any automation. A streamlined process is more agile to digitalize and evolve.
Eliminating Redundant Steps
Before building a digital workflow, it is necessary to eliminate tasks that add no value. Each step is questioned: does it truly serve the final outcome?
The elimination may involve redundant reports, paper printouts, or duplicate controls. The goal is to retain only tasks essential to quality and compliance.
This simplification effort reduces the complexity of the future tool and facilitates adoption by teams, who can then focus on what matters most.
Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
Once superfluous steps are removed, it is necessary to clearly assign each task to a specific role. This avoids hesitation, follow-ups, and uncontrolled transfers of responsibility.
Formalizing responsibilities creates a foundation of trust between departments and enables the deployment of effective alerts and escalations in the tool.
Example: An e-commerce SME refocused its billing process by precisely defining each team member’s role. The clarification reduced follow-ups by 40% and primed a future automation module to run smoothly and interruption-free.
Standardizing Key Tasks
Standardization aims to unify practices for recurring tasks (document creation, automated mailings, approval tracking). It ensures consistency of deliverables.
By standardizing formats, naming conventions, and deadlines, integration with other systems and the production of consolidated reports is simplified.
This homogenization lays the groundwork for modular automation that can adapt to variations without undermining the fundamentals.
Prioritize Business Value to Guide Your Technology Choices
Focusing automation efforts on high business-value activities avoids overinvestment. Prioritization guides technology selection and maximizes return on investment.
Focusing on Customer Satisfaction
Processes that directly contribute to the customer experience or product quality should be automated as a priority. They deliver a visible and rapid impact.
By placing the customer at the center of the process, the company ensures that digital transformation meets the responsiveness and reliability demands of the market.
This approach avoids wasting resources on secondary internal steps that do not directly influence commercial performance.
Measuring Impact and Adjusting Priorities
Evaluating expected gains relies on precise indicators: processing time, error rate, unit costs, or customer satisfaction. These metrics guide project phasing.
KPI-driven management enables rapid identification of gaps and adjustment of the roadmap before extending automation to other areas.
Adapting the Level of Automation to Expected ROI
Not all processes require the same degree of automation. Some lightweight mechanisms, such as automated notifications, are enough to streamline the flow.
For low-volume or highly variable activities, a semi-automated approach combining digital tools and human intervention can offer the best cost-quality ratio.
This tailored sizing preserves flexibility and avoids freezing processes that evolve with the business context.
Turning Your Processes into Engines of Efficiency
Digitalization should not be a mere port of a failing process into a tool. It must stem from a genuine analysis, friction elimination, and upstream simplification. Prioritizing based on business value ensures performance-driven management rather than technology-driven alone.
At Edana, our experts support Swiss companies in this structured and context-driven approach, based on open source, modularity, and security. They help clarify processes, identify value levers, and select solutions tailored to each use case.
