Process Automation Playbook
6 concepts / ~30 min / Advanced
Eliminate waste and manual coordination. Design workflows where tasks trigger automatically, data flows without human intervention, and decisions are smarter.
What This Playbook Covers
- ✓Map your core business processes and identify the 20% of steps consuming 80% of time
- ✓Design automated workflows using tools, logic, and conditional actions (no code required)
- ✓Choose between point automation, workflow automation, and full system integration
- ✓Implement safeguards and audit trails so automation doesn't create blind spots
- ✓Measure improvement in speed, cost, consistency, and error rate post-implementation
Lean Operations
Operations
💡 The Concept
Lean operations systematically eliminates waste — any activity that consumes resources without creating customer value. Toyota identified 7 types of waste: overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion, and defects. Lean companies can operate at 50-70% lower cost than non-lean competitors while delivering higher quality.
⚠️ The Trap
Teams apply 'lean' as an excuse to under-invest. Real lean isn't about cutting corners — it's about cutting WASTE. Eliminating your QA team isn't lean, it's reckless. Automating repetitive QA tests so your team focuses on complex edge cases? That's lean.
🎯 The Action
Start with a value stream map: list every step from customer request to delivery. For each step, ask 'Would the customer pay for this?' If no, it's a candidate for elimination. Target: eliminate 20% of non-value-adding activities each quarter until your process is 80%+ value-adding.
Knowledge Check
Your engineering team takes 4 weeks to ship a feature: 3 days coding, 5 days in code review queue, 4 days in QA queue, 2 days integration testing, 2 weeks waiting for the next release train. Using lean principles, what should you fix FIRST?
Use the playbook as context, then scope the live work.
If this playbook maps directly to an operating bottleneck, KnowMBA can help turn it into a diagnostic, sprint, or managed implementation path.