Pattern 01
The morning order file
A founder exports yesterday's orders, pastes them into a warehouse sheet, and fixes the rows a courier file rejected.
- Daily
- Two structured files
- A person checks the rejects
A scope would cover
- A job that joins the two files on the order id.
- Clean rows written through, and a short reject list left for a person.
- A note of which column the join depends on.
A scope would leave out
- It does not promise a new warehouse system.
- It does not decide how a damaged shipment should be handled.
Pattern 02
Closed deals copied into billing
An operator retypes closed deals into a billing sheet because the two tools do not share a customer id.
- Two or three systems
- Money waits on a person
- Weekly or daily
A scope would cover
- A shared key, even if it starts as a maintained map.
- A sync for the fields that are safe to copy.
- A stop before an invoice, where a person still approves the money.
A scope would leave out
- It does not send invoices on its own.
- It does not merge customer records that a person has not matched.
Pattern 03
An inbox that becomes a queue
Questions arrive by email. Someone reads each one, picks a type, and creates a row in a tracker.
- Many times a day
- Unstructured input
- A queue with an owner
A scope would cover
- A draft row with sender, topic, and the outcome being asked for.
- A hold on anything ambiguous, assigned to a person.
- The original message kept next to the draft.
A scope would leave out
- It does not answer the customer by itself.
- It does not close a ticket a person has not seen.
Pattern 04
The weekly number from three databases
An operator runs the same queries every week, pastes the results into slides, and hopes the filters still match last week.
- Weekly
- Structured
- A decision depends on the number
A scope would cover
- Saved queries with the filter written beside them.
- A scheduled extract into the sheet or slide source you already use.
- A visible flag when a source is late or a filter changed.
A scope would leave out
- It does not pick the business decision the number informs.
- It does not replace the person who explains the variance.
Pattern 05
The task that should stay manual
Twice a year, someone exports a single report from one system, glances at it, and files it. The steps are short and rarely change.
- Occasional
- One system
- Low cost of doing it by hand
A scope would cover
- A recommendation to leave it manual.
- A note of the condition that would make it worth revisiting: it becomes weekly, or several similar tasks stack up.
A scope would leave out
- It does not turn into a project because a tool could theoretically do it.
- It does not come with an invented hours-saved figure.