John Snyder, CEO of managed IT services provider Net Friends, has seen firsthand what that approach can produce. His company now operates roughly 110 core automation routines through its primary automation platform, which reports savings of more than 600 employee hours per month — more than double the fewer than 300 hours per month it reported at the end of last year. For Snyder, however, getting there hasn't simply been a matter of identifying manual work and automating it. It has required creating a disciplined process for deciding what work should be automated, redesigned, or eliminated altogether.

How to identify hidden workflow inefficiencies

One reason hidden workflow inefficiencies survive is surprisingly simple: Senior leaders shouldn't necessarily be close enough to see them.

"If leadership is operating at the right altitude of the business, then they are thinking big picture and working on strategic initiatives and trying to see what's around the corner," Snyder says.

The repetitive tasks that create friction often occur at a very different altitude. They may frustrate employees or consume a few minutes at a time without becoming significant enough individually to attract leadership attention.

Undocumented "shadow processes" are even harder to detect. Snyder readily admits Net Friends doesn't have a sophisticated methodology for uncovering every workaround. Often, the company discovers them accidentally.

That makes employees closest to the work essential sensors for identifying friction. Net Friends maintains Slack channels where employees can suggest improvements or propose new ideas. Snyder says there isn't a workday when the company doesn't make two or more tweaks to existing automation steps based on real-world feedback.

The goal isn't simply finding opportunities. It's creating an environment where employees continuously notice them.

Why processes should be defined before they are automated

Once an automation opportunity surfaces, the instinct may be to start building. Snyder warns against it.

"You cannot automate a process that isn't defined yet," he says.

Before Net Friends' automation specialists — called Integration Engineers — begin automating a task, they require clearly defined business goals and, at minimum, a whiteboarded workflow showing the steps involved in the current successful manual process.

Net Friends learned the importance of that discipline through experience. Snyder says attempts to jump directly from a visionary idea to automation while skipping process definition "consistently lead to abandonment and frustration."

Defining the process first also creates an opportunity to ask a more fundamental question: Should this work be automated at all?

Some processes need automation. Others need redesign. Still others should simply disappear.

Net Friends uses recurring meetings among company officers, its Integration team and the COO to make those distinctions. Larger opportunities and potential eliminations tend to surface during leadership discussions, while weekly meetings allow the team to redesign and adjust existing workflows.

The lesson isn't that every organization needs the same meeting cadence. It's that automation requires governance. Someone needs to own the decision about whether a process should be automated, improved, or stopped.

How small workflow automations can create significant business value

One of Net Friends' most valuable workflow automations grew from something that initially sounded mundane: Merging similar service tickets.

The problem became apparent during time-sensitive cybersecurity incidents. A managed detection and response vendor might identify a compromised user or device and generate a ticket. Within minutes, the affected employee and others might also contact Net Friends about the same incident.

Suddenly, multiple technicians could be responding to what was actually one problem. Ownership became unclear, employees were unnecessarily interrupted and resolution could become more complicated.

Net Friends developed an automation capable of recognizing related incoming requests and merging them while preserving their context.

The impact was substantial.

Before the automation, Snyder estimates an average incident disrupted approximately three employees for roughly an hour each. Now, one technician can typically handle the incident end-to-end in 30 minutes or less.

And the process isn't rare. Net Friends encounters approximately 50 to 70 of these incidents each month.

What looked like a small workflow adjustment therefore produced meaningful gains in employee capacity, while also improving the client experience. A single expert can stay focused on resolving the incident rather than several people independently trying to understand and address the same problem.

It's a useful reminder that the size of a task doesn't necessarily predict the size of its automation opportunity.

How to measure the ROI of process automation

When multiple automation opportunities compete for attention, measuring process automation ROI starts with a clear business outcome and an existing manual process that can be documented.

From there, leaders can determine how frequently the task occurs, how much time it consumes, and the value of the resources tied up performing it.

Hours saved provide one measure. Net Friends' primary automation platform reports more than 600 hours saved each month, although Snyder notes the company has additional automations running on other platforms that are more difficult to quantify.

But the more important measure is what those saved hours allow the business to accomplish.

Net Friends tracks the amount of client-facing service revenue its operational workforce can support and evaluates loaded-labor gross margin over time. It also benchmarks its performance against comparable managed service providers.

That moves the automation conversation beyond a simplistic question (How many minutes did we save?) toward a more strategic one: How much additional productive capacity did we create?

How to build a sustainable enterprise automation strategy

Building a sustainable enterprise automation strategy doesn't necessarily require a large transformation office or sophisticated process-mining technology.

Snyder recommends establishing a common automation platform so employees have a central place to build, learn and share. Before Net Friends selected one, it had what he describes as a diffuse collection of scripts and automation ideas that weren't consistently applied or understood.

A common platform helped create focus. But technology alone wasn't enough.

"The most important thing not covered here is the C-suite's full-throated buy-in to automation," Snyder says.

Leadership must establish a clear vision, communicate it throughout the organization and continue supporting it when implementation becomes difficult. Sustained attention keeps automation from becoming another collection of tools or abandoned experiments.

Ultimately, the opportunity isn't to automate everything employees do. It's about creating an operating discipline that continuously asks why the work exists, whether there's a better way to do it and whether a human needs to do it at all.

The five-minute task may never make it onto the CEO's dashboard. But when organizations get better at finding, questioning, and measuring those small moments of friction, they may discover that some of their biggest automation opportunities have been hiding in plain sight.