It's a common refrain. Yet, even with detailed procedures in place, inefficiencies, workarounds, and system mismatches persist. Why?
The goal of most technology projects is either to increase efficiency or to enable doing something new.
To do a great job at either, it's important to understand where you are starting from and where the real opportunities lie hidden.
In the work that I did with Copperleaf implementing value-based decision making and AI optimization for portfolio management, our team always started with mapping out current state processes and then thinking about where the organization would like to get to at the end of our work together. Wherever possible, we tried to do this by pulling in folks from the teams that actually executed the processes that we were touching.
It was always fascinating to see the gap between how work theoretically happened, and the messy practical reality of what teams grappled with on a day-to-day basis. And those gaps are full of silent inefficiencies, patchwork systems and frustrated teams.
Why does this happen?
Processes built by people removed from execution?
How involved were your execution teams in building out your current SOPs? Do they reflect the real constraints of your customers, your business, and your systems?
Training and Onboarding
Do new team members fully understand any processes that they have inherited? How easy is it to fully onboard someone new or is there a lot of tribal knowledge that a new hire needs to pick up informally over time?
Ongoing Changes?
Do you have the same team and team structure now as you did when you built out your SOPs? Do they cover everything that your customers internal and external need from you day to day? Have any of your systems evolved?
Are shortcuts an operational reality?
Do teams need to execute workarounds or skip steps relative to your original SOP due to time, cost, or production pressures?
And why does it matter?
- Efficiency Loss – are you seeing extra touches in your warehouse? Unnecessary approval steps? Duplicated data entry?
- Quality and compliance – are all the safety and quality checks that should be happening consistently part of the day-to-day reality?
- Staff burnout – are employees overwhelmed with trying to manage an ever-growing workload while constantly "fixing" systems manually?
- Tech Underperformance – are you seeing the ROI that you expected from your existing systems? Are those systems really to blame or do you have a workflow misfit?
What can be done?
I am incredibly excited about what AI agents have the potential to do for our workflows. I have worked on a lot of systems integrations over time and there was always a tremendous need to compromise generality and the ability to handle things slightly outside the normal in order to achieve a reasonable specification that could actually be implemented. Sometimes, it just was not super practical to build integrations because there was too much judgement inherent in the workflow. The opportunity to build integrations using intelligent agents offers tremendous promise to move beyond rigid rules to a more flexible and adaptive approach.
Training, onboarding, and continuous adaptation of processes is another place that I see AI really helping us in our day to day. Imagine documentation and training videos as well as system configurations and integrations automatically updated based on a decision to adapt a process.
Change is a constant and these new adaptive systems offer us an opportunity to build with that in mind.
As with any systems change, though, it is crucial to understand first both where you are REALLY starting from as well as where you would like to get to. There are 3 pieces to that equation:
- Strategy Execution – What are the goals for our business? How do we see getting there? Are there new possibilities that we can use technology to create for our customers?
- Current State – What do our real processes look like today on the shop floor and in the back office? Where are there gaps and inefficiencies?
- Desired Future State – What do I want to change from what I am doing today? How does this tie into executing on my strategy? How can I think about embedding flexibility and change into my systems and processes going forward?
What has been your experience with systems implementation and process change? What has worked well in your business? Have you experimented yet with AI agent deployment?