What the good candidates have in common

The test

A process is worth building a system around when it repeats, when the rules exist somewhere even if nobody wrote them down, and when the record of what happened matters to somebody other than the person doing it.

Volume matters less than people expect. A process that runs a few times a day and takes real judgement is often a better candidate than one that runs constantly and takes none.

Quoting and estimating

Priced from a company's own history, its own rules and its closest past jobs, and drafted for a person to approve. The knowledge is already there; it is just not searchable.

This is usually where the exceptions are densest, which is why it repays the mapping rather than the modelling.

Intake, document review and reconciliation

Intake is where information arrives in whatever shape the sender chose, and somebody makes it fit the business. Document review is the same problem with more pages and a deadline.

Reconciliation is the clearest case of all: two records that should agree, a rule for what to do when they do not, and an exception queue nobody enjoys.

Renewals have a date, a set of rules, and a business that loses money quietly when they slip. They also carry the exceptions that make a customer feel known.

How to tell whether yours qualifies

Renewals

Who does it today, and what do they know that nobody else does. Which systems does it read and write. And if it went wrong, who would need to be able to see why.

Three questions

If those three have answers, the process can be built around. If they do not, the first piece of work is finding them, which is a scoping session rather than a build.