If You Do It Every Monday, a Robot Should Do It Instead
Wanjiru arrives at the office at 8:15 every Monday, having survived Thika Road and a matatu playing gospel remixes at a volume usually reserved for stadiums. She makes chai. She opens her laptop. And then, for the next two and a half hours, she does exactly what she did last Monday, and the Monday before that, and every Monday since the office got Wi-Fi. Nobody has told her yet that this is a textbook case for business process automation in Kenya.
She downloads last week's sales from the till system. She pastes them into a spreadsheet. She fixes the dates, because the till system thinks it is American. She builds a summary, emails it to the director, then sends the same numbers to the WhatsApp group because the director does not open email. By 10:45 she is tired, and the week has not even started.
If this sounds familiar, here is the uncomfortable truth: if a task happens on a schedule, follows the same steps and produces the same kind of output, a computer should be doing it. Not you. You have better things to do, like the work that actually needs a human brain.
The Monday Test for Business Process Automation
Here is a simple way to find automation candidates in your business. Sit down on a Monday afternoon with a cup of tea and list everything you or your team did that morning. Then ask three questions about each item:
Did we do this exact thing last week?
Did we follow the same steps, in the same order?
Could I write the steps down for a new intern without saying it depends?
If the answer to all three is yes, congratulations, you have found a job for a robot. If the answer to the third question is 'it depends', that is fine too. It usually means part of the task can be automated and a human makes the final call.
Common Monday Culprits
After many years of watching Kenyan offices at work, we can tell you that the usual suspects are remarkably consistent. The same chores turn up whether you run a hardware shop in Eldoret or a consultancy in Westlands:
Pulling weekly sales or collections figures into a report
Sending reminders to clients whose payments are due
Updating the stock sheet after the weekend
Compiling attendance or timesheets for the week
Backing up files, assuming someone remembers
Forwarding the same documents to the same people
None of these require creativity. They require patience and accuracy, which are exactly the two things humans run out of by mid-morning and computers never do.
What a Robot Actually Looks Like
When we say robot, we do not mean a shiny metal man walking around Upper Hill. Most business automation is boring and invisible, which is the best kind. It might be a scheduled report that lands in your inbox at 7am. It might be a system that reads M-Pesa payments and marks invoices as paid. It might be a simple rule that sends a WhatsApp message whenever a delivery is dispatched.
The key idea is that the steps run on their own, on time, every time, whether or not Wanjiru is stuck behind a broken-down lorry at Pangani.
Start Small, Start Boring
The temptation, once you discover automation, is to try and automate the whole business by Friday. Pole pole. The best first project is something small, annoying and low risk. A weekly report is perfect. If it breaks, nobody loses money; somebody just has to do it by hand one more time, which is what they were doing anyway.
A good order of operations looks like this:
Write down the steps exactly as they happen today
Remove any steps that exist only because someone did them in 2017
Automate the boring middle, keep a human for the final check
Run the old way and the new way side by side for two weeks
Retire the old way and enjoy your Monday
That second step deserves a special mention. Many processes contain fossils: a column nobody reads, a copy sent to a manager who left three years ago, a printout that goes straight into a drawer. Automating a bad process just gives you a faster bad process. Clean it up first.
What Wanjiru Does Now
These days the sales summary builds itself overnight and arrives in the director's inbox and the WhatsApp group before he has finished his first mandazi. Wanjiru checks it for anything odd, which takes ten minutes, and then spends the rest of her morning on supplier negotiations, which is the work she was actually hired to do.
She still makes chai at 8:15. Some traditions are sacred. But Monday no longer feels like a punishment for having enjoyed the weekend.
If you have a list of Monday chores and are not sure which ones can be handed over, tell us about them. We will happily tell you which ones a robot can take and which ones genuinely need you, and you can browse our automation and software services in the meantime.