We get the same job sent to us ten different ways

An owner described how work arrives at his business last week, and I have not stopped thinking about the way he put it. He runs a survey business, and his answer to a fairly dull question about intake was this.

We get jobs in from, what, ten different ways. We get them by email, we get them by Dropbox, we get them by Google Drive, we get them by whatever.

Then he walked me through what happens next. A job lands, so somebody has to make up a folder, make up a job number in the accounting system, move everything that came in by email into that folder, and tell the next person it is there. Then somebody checks what is in the folder, opens the engineering software, generates the wind and snow loads, exports the result, finds the right report template, pastes two sets of software output into a document, and reads it through to make sure it makes sense. His own summary of all of that was a lot of admin time eaten up by doing not an awful lot.

The ten doors are the problem, not the admin

When people ask me to automate this, they almost always point at the middle of the chain. Can the software make the folder. Can it fill in the template. Yes to both, and neither is where this job is won or lost. You cannot write a process you can rely on when there are ten different ways for work to arrive, because the first step of that process has to be a guess about where to go and look.

So the first thing I would build here is not clever at all. It is one front door. Every customer gets a login and submits a job in the same shape every time: the site address, the building type, the roof type, the drawings, whatever the engineer genuinely needs to start. The moment that exists, most of the rest stops being automation and becomes arithmetic. One job in, one number, one folder, the right template chosen by building type, the site measurements typed into a phone on the roof instead of written on paper and retyped at a desk.

The part that actually fails

It is not the software. It is that some customers will carry on emailing, because that is what they have always done, and no owner is going to make a good customer learn a new system in order to place work. So the front door needs a side entrance. Email keeps getting accepted, and it lands in the same place as the form, with somebody spending a minute putting it into the right shape rather than an hour rebuilding the file from scratch.

I would much rather have one door with a side entrance than ten doors with a clever robot behind each of them. Ten robots is ten things to fix the week somebody changes a template.

What I ask before building any of it

• Where does work physically arrive today, every route, including the awkward ones
• Who touches it first, and what do they have to invent each time
• Which of the systems you already pay for will let something else talk to them
• What has to be looked at by a human before it goes to a customer

Nine times out of ten the answers show the admin was never really the problem. The problem is that nobody ever agreed on one place to put things, so every person solved it their own way and the business has been paying for that ever since. Software does not fix that on its own. It makes the agreement stick.