ProcessGate: Pre-Automation Workflow Discovery and Scoping Tool for Consultants

before you buy automation software, spend twenty minutes capturing the task

before you buy automation software, spend twenty minutes capturing the task

As a consultant who has done 8-figure cost-takeout initiatives specifically around process improvement and automation, you're missing the most critical aspect. Taking a recording, or an existing process, and automating it is a terrible idea. Just because that's how it's done today does not mean it's the right way, or the most efficient way, to do the process. The current-state process should be documented, then re-engineered (which is a whole topic on its own) to determine when and where automation is useful. Otherwise, you're just **automating waste faster**. A screen recording tells you what one person does today. It does not tell you whether those steps should exist, whether the handoffs are necessary, whether the controls are redundant, whether the upstream data or system should be fixed instead, or whether the process should exist at all. The goal of process improvement isn't to faithfully reproduce every click an employee currently makes. It's to eliminate unnecessary work, simplify what remains, standardize it where appropriate, and only then automate the parts where automation creates value. "Record what they do and build that" is how you end up with an expensive robot meticulously reproducing a bad process. If your automation discovery process begins and ends with "show me what you click," you're not doing process engineering. You're doing **software-assisted mimicry**. The irony is that the post warns people not to skip discovery while proposing a discovery process that skips **process improvement entirely**.