
Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company? - anacleto
E.g. Onboarding of new employees, expenses, security, etc..
======
Johnny555
I'd get rid of the manual process of driving to the office every day and
replace it with collaboration tools to let people telecommute full time. We
actually use such tools, but have a "no remote workers" policy. Occasional
work from home is fine, just not full time.

~~~
BjoernKW
Can you tell what the reason behind that policy is? Whenever I hear something
like this I like to challenge it by the following:

Working remotely should be the default, not the outlier.

If your organisation requires personal presence something in your organisation
is broken (management processes, the way people interact, obsolete tools
etc.). Fix that instead of patching what's broken by mandating personal
presence.

Chances are not only will your employees be happier but you'll also uncover
potential for optimisation.

~~~
GuiA
My organization requires personal presence because we work on prototype
hardware that costs several hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars to make,
so we can't just make one for each of us and bring it home. (And even if we
could, these things require regular fixing, and if I'm in Japan and the girl
who knows how to resolder a certain component in Chile, that's not very
practical)

Sometimes I can work from home if I prepare work in advance to account for it
(e.g. collect data from the hardware to enable offline testing), but it's
extra overhead.

 _> If your organisation requires personal presence something in your
organisation is broken _

Please tell, what's broken in my org?

~~~
BjoernKW
> > If your organisation requires personal presence something in your
> organisation is broken

> Please tell, what's broken in my org?

What I'm getting at with this is that if personal presence is mandatory you
should have an actual reason for that. Your organisation obviously does.

The more usual reason for mandatory personal presence unfortunately is
"Because it's always been done this way and we like to see butts in seats
because we don't trust our employees nor do we know how to manage what they're
working on or how to measure their results."

~~~
solipsism
Maybe you should avoid making wild, nuance-free pronouncements then.

------
jehna1
Lawyers.

The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent
terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of
your local lawyer.

The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has
your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're
building.

After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some
English-like gibberish 15-page document that has been passed through the email
and you're sure that after all the hours you've put in to try to make sense of
the document your clients have no chance to understand even half of it so
you're just putting it in since the whole service is already past the deadline
and everyone's anyway blindly ticking the box without reading.

The reason why this hasn't changed is that lawyers get paid by the hour, so
it's not wise for them to automate anything.

For personal projects I've used some of the 5$ templates from quick Google
search, but the problem is that I have no-one who'd take the blame when the
shit hits the fan.

In the perfect world this would be an automated computer program that'd ask me
a few questions and produce a perfectly understandable and legally binding
document that has some trustworthy corporation behind it making sure I won't
get sued for trying to do simple business.

~~~
blazespin
You can't really automate lawyers, unfortunately, anymore than you can
automate accountants. Someone has to assume the liability for giving you legal
advice / accounting advice. Computers can't yet assume such liability.

~~~
jehna1
That's true. The computer cannot be liable for the advice.

I see two ways around this:

1\. The company behind the computer takes full responsibility and charges for
the risk. Stripe has made online payments a breeze, because they are the one
taking responsibility for the legal things (securing payments, proofing
physical access to servers holding the credit card data etc).

2\. The tool is so understandable that I'm willing to take the legal risk.
There are a few tools that make accounting so easy for a small business owner
that I'm willing to take the legal risk myself about the accounting.

------
brazzledazzle
This isn't really what you were looking for so feel free to flag me as off
topic since I'm kind of piggybacking on it. I feel like a lot of people at
bigger companies know what needs to be done, how to do it, want to do it and
sometimes have even purchased something to accomplish it but we have the
hardest time getting traction.

I think one major issue is that manual processes often don't really "hurt"
managers, they hurt the people doing them. To a developer or ops admin, "This
$badthing caused by a typo won't happen again if we automate this" sounds very
reasonable but sometimes managers just see it as a mistake that someone will
need to be more careful about. Once they've factored the turnaround time into
how they estimate they don't seem as interested in speeding things up. All
that seems exacerbated by reactionary/feature driven mindsets which makes any
kind of improvement that doesn't have an external event/person driving it very
hard to get slotted. This seems to be made worse if you're working with a
manager that's never really done the work that the people they're managing do
or they did it so long ago they don't have an intuitive understanding of how
it works today.

Another one is that a lot of people who perform a manual process for a long
period of time become invested in it and defensive of it. No matter how much
faster or better it is and no matter how involved they are if they end up
feeling threatened it's probably dead in the water. Pretty typical human
nature thing I think but at a big company with a lot of old established manual
processes this can slow automation efforts down to a glacial crawl. Even if
there's only one person that fully understands it I don't think managers
appreciate the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket.

Eventually things do get automated but it seems like it's driven by a disaster
or politics more than anything else. And sometimes not even disaster seems to
be enough to drive real change if someone isn't pursuing it.

If anyone has tips on how to deal with any of this I'd love to hear them.

~~~
NumberCruncher
Automate your own tasks and do not tell anybody. Have a chilled out life!

It worked out for me until a got hospitalized for weeks and the college who
took over my tasks figured it out. I did the same two more times and leard a
lot about refactoring bad architectures. I jumped ship an sold myself as the
guy who automates processes. Now I can refuse doing boring manual tasks. It
makes me really satisfied.

~~~
bryondowd
This made me think of an old gig I had. It was a sort of so-easy-a-caveman-
could-do-it tech support job. They actually had us printing out a report from
an HTML document, cutting out portions that weren't supposed to be there with
scissors, and then photocopying the cut up page to get a final report to mail
out to the client. I'll let that sink in...

It didn't take me long to start editing the HTML document directly to skip the
physical work (someone before me had figured this much out, but hadn't been
able to teach anyone else well enough to pass it along when he left, just a
vague rumor that it had happened). Then I went ahead and made a crude script
to edit the documents automatically, ultimately turning an hour long job into
a 2 minute one with cleaner looking results. Ended up spending a lot of time
at that job just watching TV.

My next job after that was all about automating manual processes, but with
less down time since I was automating other people's jobs, rather than my own.
I think I preferred the former.

~~~
CaptSpify
I used to work for a company basically copying and pasting data from one excel
spreadsheet to the other. I didn't know how to program yet, but I knew there
had to be a better way, so I learned macros. I spent ~20 minutes a day
working. I worked part-time and when I left, my boss commented on how I got
done more than all of the full-timers there.

I personally think the biggest benefit to every company would be to drill into
people's heads how software should automate your day to day work. Software
people think that way, but most employees don't.

------
skyyler
I'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They
don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack
mounted servers. We have 30 tower servers sitting on a specially built shelf,
taking up most of a room. It's absurd but I have so much other shit to do that
I can't justify completely disrupting their entire workflow

~~~
digitalsushi
I left a place a year ago where I ran the lab. I remember the satisfaction of
my replacement converting all the VMs into "real computers", and then
triplicating the VLAN network I had with layer 1 replacements.

I'm pretty sure if he could have unspooled cat5 to everyone's home, he would
have gotten rid of the VPN server.

~~~
ajford
So what's the benefit of VMs? I mean, I understand the underlying benefits of
isolation and such, but for things that easily fit on small servers (i.e.
single/double core small procs with <4GB RAM), why is it better to virtualize
instead of having a physical server for that task? Assuming said task isn't
vital enough to have several redundant systems?

I've gone both ways before, but I seem to be on the other end of the spectrum
and prefer small cheap hardware over VMs when possible.

Not trying to argue or anything, just curious for someone else's point of
view.

~~~
pythonaut_16
Those small things are actually the ideal use case for VMs.

Imagine wanting to spin up a new server so you go and buy that small tower,
bring it back, and hook it up.

Now imagine using a VM where you literally go onto a webpage and click a
button to provision the same amount of resources.

Additionally, most hardware sits idle most of the time. When you're using tons
of towers, it's likely that most of them will sit under 50% load 90+% of the
time. With a VM setup, the hypervisor can balance that better so you can get
better utilization of your hardware.

------
hentrep
I work in pharma, and our biggest bottleneck is drafting and executing service
agreements and statements of work with new vendors. A system to facilitate
this workflow would be amazing (document templates, a queue for requests with
weekly status updates, etc.)

Of course there is manual work done by Legal that can't be easily automated,
but that is just one component of the bottleneck.

~~~
robodale
hentrap - msg or email me. I've been itching to create a new project that also
solves a huge/real pain. I'd really like to hear your workflow steps in
detail. Here's a temp email I setup if you want to reach out:
hn@robodale.33mail.com (removed public mailinator email per mbrookes advice)

~~~
mbrookes
You guys realise that mailinator is public? Dale, I can see your email
address.

I highly recommend 33mail.com instead - it has a pretty generous free tier:
[http://33mail.com/rj37w3](http://33mail.com/rj37w3).

(Not associated, just a long-time user and happy paying customer.)

~~~
robodale
haha, oh crap mbrookes. Looks like I fell on my face with this. Thanks for the
33mail tip. Hey, hentrap - email me here:

hn@robodale.33mail.com

~~~
mbrookes
Incidentally, since I don't see it mentioned anywhere obvious on the site, you
can also use @yourdom.33m.co as short address.

------
Afforess
Security.

90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique
ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and
auto-generated ssh keys.

~~~
kgilpin
Rotation is a really interesting subject which has true security benefits.
Unfortunately manual rotation is a PITA. What works better is to have an
automated system rotating the credentials, and then you fetch the credentials
as-needed by authenticating with an identity and access management system.

For example, in Conjur there is a suite of rotators
([https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation](https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation))
for rotating things like SSH keys, database passwords, and cloud credentials.
In each case, the rotator changes the credential in the backend (e.g. changes
the public key in the authorized_keys file), and then stores the new
credential behind an access-controlled and audited API where only you (and
other authorized roles) can fetch it.

Disclosure: I am CTO of Conjur.

~~~
Corrado
A bit off topic, but the conjur.net domain seems to be a bit broken.
[https://conjur.net](https://conjur.net) doesn't work properly and it threw an
SSL/TLS certificate error the first time I visited. Also, it appears as if
your main site doesn't redirect to HTTPS. As a security company my first
thought is that if you can't handle these simple things I'm not sure I'm ready
to talk to you about more complex matters.

------
michael_michael
Domestic freight, specifically rate quoting and booking.

I sell large equipment to the food & spirits industry. It often has to be
shipped on pallets. Before a customer decides to order something from us they
generally want to know the freight shipping cost. Rates vary daily, so our
salesperson has to stop the sales process to get a freight quotation.

3PL companies already exist, and are supposed to exist to get a best-available
rate from the sprawling mess of local, intrastate, and interstate freight
carriers. Still, we've found that to REALLY get the best freight rates we have
to send out a quote request to 3+ different 3PL companies, wait for all the
quotes to come back in, figure out the cheapest quote from the most reliable
carrier, then re-ask the same 3PL parties if they're willing to beat the best
available rate. The sales process loses a ton of momentum, and it wastes our
shipping manager's time.

~~~
ajford
So what you're saying is you need a Third Party 3PL Logistics company :)

------
kabes
A better version of this: [http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-
bin/live](http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live) . The corporate bullshit
generator. If it could also make powerpoints with nice graphs of merging
product timelines, we could replace most of management.

------
rch
Phone screens, for recruiters and applicants.

Basically I want both sides to be faithfully represented by conversational AI,
inclusive of demeanor, domain knowlege, and general aptitude.

~~~
cableshaft
Hahahah! You just made me think of creating a chatbot to answer people's
questions about me for phone screen interviews, since answering the same
questions over and over and over again has gotten me to the point where I
sometimes procrastinate getting back to recruiters because I don't want to go
through the process for the fiftieth time.

"How much experience do you have with Unity?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "I
worked with Unity on projects blah and blah and....". "Tell me more about your
leadership in project blah?" <chatbot-version-of-me>: "With project blah, I
was in charge of X number of people. The project was completed over a period
of X months and ...etc."

That's what you're suggesting, isn't it?

~~~
rch
Pretty much! I'd also include narrative answers about challenges overcome,
accomplishments, etc. and boilerplate about how great the company is,
respectively.

It's critical to have the interviewer side fully automated as well, so the
bots can all talk to one another and just ping us when things match up.
Imagine the hyper conversations from the movie Her, but for jobs.

------
tyingq
The difficult part is that the areas that could be automated are usually the
ones that would buy the automation software.

The person signing up for the automation would be reducing their total
headcount, making them a perceived smaller player in the overall organization.

I've seen this in the purchasing part of big corporations. They automate with
Ariba or similar, but then, don't shrink (even via attrition) to get the
benefit.

Worse, because all these people still want something to do, they then inject
more manual processes to feel like they are busy. Ugh.

------
kylixz
As my company grows 50+ our DOO is failing at tracking who's working what and
when. We use JIRA and have timekeeping but don't use either for resourcing.
Also the company has 10 independent projects. I'd love to have some tool
besides a spreadsheet or hearsay about upcoming work and who's doing it.

~~~
atmosx
JIRA is terrible in my opinion but has evolved and many (most?) small, medium
and big software houses use it.

There are more alternatives than I can count did you look elsewhere? For some
reason people continue using JIRA and investing time and money on it. JIRA has
an awful interface, is unnecessarily complicated, has a learning curve (when
it shouldn't) and you actually need to know SQL in order to create _helpful
views_ for trivial things (e.g. have a proper view of hours/projects worked
per week).

~~~
beamatronic
The earlier versions (3.x) were simpler, yet still customizable, and great for
a lot of tasks.

------
Corrado
I would like a tool that looks at what people are doing and fills out
timesheets automatically. Stop asking your developers what they are working on
directly and start looking at their artifacts. For example, if Dev A. just
checked in a bunch of code for Project Alpha, there is a good chance they have
been working on Project Alpha for the past X hours. If QA person Q just ran a
bunch of tests for Project B and updated a spreadsheet, there is a good chance
that they have been working on Project B for the past Y hours. Person W just
updated a bunch of Wiki pages for Project C? And so on.

Sure, you can't capture everything everyone does, but most of the "timesheets"
I've had to fill out in the past could have at least started with this
information and allowed me to modify it. I hate filling out timesheets and
keeping track of what I do. I'm doing work, something should keep track of
that for me.

~~~
ivm
Isn't it what time trackers do?

Mac: [https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/](https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/) (our app,
the site lacks info but it has export now)

Linux: [https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy](https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy)

Windows: [http://www.manictime.com/](http://www.manictime.com/)

------
ju-st
Ordering of stuff from central IT. I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I
need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he
desperately needs for a customer project. The request for the server was only
processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the
central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware
but a virtual server!

~~~
iamdave
_I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My
boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer
project._

Pardon my language: holy shit.

How large is your organization??? All I _do_ at work is build dev
environments, manage credential storage, and every now and then get roped into
server upgrades kicking and screaming...four months for a freaking _dev
environment_???

FOUR? How does this happen?

~~~
wellsthrowaway
At Wells Fargo, I'd kill for a dev environment in general. We only do
production-classified-as-dev. And 4 months? Slow down! We're six months...if
you're lucky.

~~~
wlesieutre
How's that joke go? Everybody has a testing environment, some people are lucky
enough to have a separate environment to run production in?

------
Fnoord
Our password policy is pretty terrible. We don't even have our own user
profiles. Whenever I'm on a different desk than my own, I get to experience a
completely different desktop. With completely different applications
installed, settings, etc. I work part-time hence my desk isn't the same
permanent spot, so this does occur regularly. So apart from a security hazard,
this is also a productivity loss.

I'd also swap everything to Linux (my preference is macOS, but I can see how
that'd increase cost). For the kind of development we do, Linux is just as
good as the other two.

I honestly don't know how to solve the issue for me easily. Perhaps just
install all applications and settings on a thumb drive?

------
beat
A related question, for my own interests... how _able_ do you feel to automate
things at work? If you find a tool that can automate a severe pain point, can
you bring a vendor in for a demo? Can you get a budget or get a manager to pay
for automation tools?

As a founder about to hit the market with an automation tool, I'm _very_
curious about the roadblocks and resistance that engineers perceive about
bringing in tools that can save a lot of pain and money.

~~~
btown
It's generic advice, but: Make sure you're solving the manager's pain point,
not the low-level employee's (i.e. "this gets the information/service to you
with a higher guarantee of quality and always at your fingertips" rather than
"this saves your employee a lot of stress"), and make sure you're marketing to
the manager, not just the low-level employee. And if you get lower-level
employees as leads, make sure they have the ammunition (white papers, etc.) so
they can escalate to their managers in terms of solving their managers' pain
points.

~~~
DrJokepu
Actually, if you really want to score some office politics brownie points, you
should try to solve the manager's manager's pain points!

~~~
beat
I'm thinking of focusing on downtime and shortening recovery time from
failures as a marketing angle. It's not the only problem I'm trying to solve,
but it seems like a solid sell for management's pain points. Whether or not
they care if their engineers are miserable, they care if they're losing a
thousand bucks a minute on a down system.

------
pknerd
I automated entire process of applying jobs on Glassdoor by using Python and
Selenium. Already sold to a few students.

~~~
crystalPalace
This sounds interesting and potentially very useful. Would you mind sharing a
link to your project or giving a more in-depth description?

~~~
pknerd
you may contact me via email given in my profile

------
mnm1
Bringing our main app into various states (and also regular Selenium tests
based on the same code, ideally in Clojure). It currently takes dozens of
clicks and dozens of pages, all super repetitive to get to most places in the
app (super long question / answer based interface). I should have done this
years ago when I joined but the pain has finally become great enough that it
can't be ignored anymore.

------
egberts1
I would automate coffee making. Too many lazy or disrespectful coworkers
skipping the making of coffee after taking the last cup.

~~~
yellowapple
The IETF tried that, but everyone ended up just building "compliant" teapots
and calling it a day.

------
xiaoma
Dealing with US banks from abroad. It took an _absurd_ amount of effort to get
an account opened and after over a month, I _still_ don't have debit cards.

~~~
chadgeidel
I'm pretty sure this is a "feature" not a "bug" due to regulation. I'm not
saying it's bad or good (I understand why).

~~~
xiaoma
Someone asks what I manual processes I want automated, I tell them.

Actually, automating "dealing with regulation in general" would be the most
amazing thing ever.

~~~
jenkstom
Keep your fingers crossed for artificial intelligence. It's going to be a wild
ride.

------
pknerd
A developer would like to do welcome such kind of _automation_

[http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-
job-6...](http://interestingengineering.com/programmer-automates-job-6-years-
boss-fires-finds/)

~~~
kzisme
Reminds of me this post/story:

[https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts](https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-
scripts)

------
MooBah
Interviewing and hiring interaction for seasonal workers.

We hire tons and tons of IC's two times per year. We run into bottlenecks due
to time on the phone during interviews. If there way a consistent way to
screen talent it would save us a ton of time.

~~~
p_ronto
I've never used it myself (I'm just a programmer) but perhaps Workable
([https://www.workable.com/](https://www.workable.com/)) might be what you're
looking for.

------
AznHisoka
onboarding new developers so they understand the essentials of our
archeitecture and code base.

that includes writing up all the documentation. (what, you thought youd just
create a sleek ui with the documentation provided by users? no! thats the hard
part!)

~~~
robmay
We do this at Talla. A lot of our companies use us to onboard new employees in
Slack, or MS Teams.

------
knieveltech
Time tracking. Like, the physical act of figuring out how much time was spent
on X task for Y client and then logging that in. And no, cheesy little desktop
apps that provide a UI and timers for this are not the answer I'm looking for.

~~~
nikolaj
The challenge we faced and still face is more making it clear on how to
classify time to the rank and file team (I work in a digital agency).

We are pretty much ~90% now.. ..some lessons learned:

1\. Just have people track rough time per day (a couple hours here, a couple
hours there), but make sure it is done daily. The resolution will hold up when
you analyze it. What seems rough each day, ends up being quite accurate over
weeks/months.

2\. Don't be strict about budgets AND ask for perfect accuracy in time
tracking. You are offloading the responsibility of good estimates to the team,
and boxing them in.. screwing your long term job costing.

3\. Build a dashboard that summarizes project / account status and is as
useful and obvious for Project Managers & Leadership, and they will become
advocates in promoting good time tracking hygiene. (I guess this is a basic
truism in general.. build systems where the best way to use it is the easiest
way.. )

------
blakesterz
Onboarding of new _customers_. I feel like we must do this different than most
places because I've not been even able to find a good system to even track the
steps and things I do to get them set up and started. I've tried just about
every task and project manager out there, most of them were good enough, but
nothing was ever perfect. Using Basecamp now, has proven to be " _good enough_
" so far (support has been perfect though). I feel like a bunch of this should
be able to be automated with something that already exists.

~~~
jasonallen
I'm confused by what you mean. I'd argue that onboarding new customers should
be your core competency, the focus of your main product. What am I missing?

~~~
devopsproject
> What am I missing?

The human element.

We make an application that makes use of folder on a network share. One of the
developers here types up instructions each time we install a new site. If the
customer has trouble or opts to have our help, they will connect remotely to
create a folder and some sub folders. This takes anywhere from a few minutes
to over an hour if they have trouble connecting remotely.

I mentioned in a developer meeting that we should create an install script for
the network folders. It would save the company hundreds of hours or work.

One developed asked how I would do it. A generally competent developer, who
has worked with files and folders for many years, asked how we could deliver a
program to create folders.

I nearly walked out (and we still dont have a 4 line script to create the
folders we need)

------
beaver6969
Someone looking for start up ideas?

~~~
charlieegan3
Looks like it - have you got any?

~~~
beaver6969
Not yet - will hopefully pick up a few from this thread!

~~~
rrhyne
You should automate the discovery of startup ideas by posting a thread here
every few days.

~~~
krapp
That would be a quick way to get banned.

~~~
ryanlol
Are you really going to let that stop you?
[https://luminati.io/](https://luminati.io/)
[http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/](http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/)

------
gigatexal
Database changes. We can't use database projects just yet but I'd like to find
a way to automate it much the same way that you can apt-get install things.

~~~
gigatexal
if anyone has any suggestions about dependency management and automated
deployables in the MSSQL world I'd be open

~~~
BjoernKW
It's called Flyway: [https://flywaydb.org/](https://flywaydb.org/)

~~~
gigatexal
Looks promising I'll check it out. Thanks.

------
superquest
Firing the CEO

~~~
jonwachob91
You think you can do a better job as the CEO than the CEO you have now? Or you
know someone that you think can do a better job?

~~~
akerro
No, he thinks he could write a script to fire his CEO, so they don't have to
do it every day.

~~~
ythn
At my work we just have a Jenkins job that fires the current CEO first thing
in the morning

~~~
yev
Dude, simple cron job is enough.. 30 8 * * * /fire/ceo/now

~~~
ratsbane
I'd make it event-driven. /usr/sbin/hire --ceo starts a setTimeout(function()
{`/usr/sbin/fire --ceo`}, 'INTERVAL 60 DAY') (And that is a weird bit of
pseudocode, indeed.)

~~~
cellularmitosis
Ridiculous. This is obviously a job for systemd.

~~~
yellowapple
That's what the last CEO said before we fired him.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Estimating when we'll have something done by modelling the department like
some people model the weather.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Using my left hand on the keyboard.

Edit: What? This is a great idea. Does anyone know a good encoding scheme for
the 10 key?

~~~
foreigner
AutoCAD used to be amazing at this.

------
andrewfong
I used to work in a big law firm working on startup-related corporate work. A
substantial portion of my job looked like this:

* Find a form or template for a document. Sometimes the "template" wasn't really a template but "we worked on a deal that was pretty similar to this one three months ago -- use that". Sometimes the template was "use this form except for this one section you should use from that form".

* Tag form / template as "version 1" in our document management system.

* Fill in all the blanks, remove brackets, etc.

* Tag this as "version 2" in our document management system.

* Create a diff / redline with all my changes.

* Send diff to partner for review.

* Incorporate changes from partner into document.

* Replace (rather than append) "version 2" in our document management system with the new doc.

* Email document to opposing counsel for review.

* If we're sharing docs with opposing counsel via Dropbox, Box, etc., upload there too. But also email them, because they might not remember to check Dropbox.

* Bug opposing counsel every 24-48 hours until they respond with an edited copy of our document.

* Let partners and clients know that you are bugging opposing counsel so they know it's totally not your fault if this deal doesn't get done by Friday.

* Save opposing counsel's edited document as "version 3" in our document management system.

* Create a diff of the document they send and ask partner to review.

* Bug partner every 24 hours until they respond with more changes.

* Save this as "version 4" in our document management system.

* Send this, along with a diff, back to opposing counsel.

* Somewhere in this process we also pass along to our actual client for review.

* Repeat until no one has any more changes. Do this for many more documents that are part of the same deal.

* Send out the first set of documents for signature. Some people don't want to actually review the things they're signing (crazy!), so we create "signature packets" where it's just like four signature pages in a row. Also, everyone has a different set of documents to sign so different people get different sets of pages + documents -- and sometimes we need to make sure that person X doesn't see some document that only person Y can see because secrets.

* Or we use an e-signature service, in which case I spend some time creating little boxes over all the document so the service knows that this is a place where a signature-like image has to go.

* Discover some error in document. Fix. Redo all of my little boxes.

* Respond to people confused about how e-signatures work. Sometimes if there are four documents, the signatory gets four e-mails and then they're confused as to whether they should just sign the last one or all four or whatever (you should sign all four). Also, sometimes people refuse to use e-signatures, so we have to explain to people that because Docusign says the deal is done doesn't mean it's actually done.

* Sometimes this is where we file stuff with the state government.

* Send out a second set of documents of signature. We don't send these out with the first set (even if the same person is signing stuff in both the first and second set) because it's very important that the second set not be signed until _after_ the first set is signed by all the parties (or after we get some sort of confirmation back from the government if there's a filing involved). Sometimes we have very important people that hate being interrupted to sign documents, so we let them sign everything in one go but hold some of those signatures "in escrow" so we can "release the signatures" in the right order.

* Track all of the outstanding signatures and filings via a spreadsheet and try to update this in as "real time" as possible.

* Respond to partner or client asking you about deal status by pointing to spreadsheet.

* Respond to partner or client unable to open spreadsheet for whatever reason by summarizing signature status in text form.

* Bug people periodically until everything is signed.

* If any of the parties to a deal refuses to e-sign stuff, this is where I have to create a "final" signed PDF copy of the documents, wherein I replace blank signature pages in a document with some faxed or scanned signature page.

* If signatures were being held "in escrow", bug the people who are holding the signatures in escrow for confirmation that the signatures are released.

* Sometimes these people need to bug other people for confirmation. These people then ask lots of questions like "has other person X signed yet?". Point to spreadsheet.

* Sometimes money gets wired here. Wait until we confirm the money came in.

* Signatures are released! The money came in! Tell everyone the deal is done!

* Curl into fetal position.

~~~
ajford
That sounds.... painful...

Totally does seem like something that can be nicely automated to some level.
Even document tracking and associated metadata (like a list of participants
and status of signatures per page, approval of document, etc) would help.

~~~
enraged_camel
Of course it can be automated. The problem is that everyone involved in the
process is extremely resistant to automation because clients are billed by the
hour and automation would result in fewer hours spent on the case, which means
decreased revenue.

~~~
davidlee1435
I'm a total outsider to this field, so forgive me if the answer to this is
trivial/obvious, but why not sell a service like this directly to the client?

~~~
andrewfong
If you give outside counsel any significant role in a transaction, they'll
find some way to create work and bump the bill up to whatever cap you set. So
you don't really save cost-wise unless you're able to almost entirely remove
the human element.

Now as to why we don't remove human lawyers from the process ... I think it's
trust, mostly.

It's a bit like selling automated medical services. Your clients don't always
have benchmarks for what's "good" legal work, much in the same they don't know
if they're getting "good" medical advice, so it's hard to evaluate the quality
of an automated service. And since there's always some chance the automation
misses some edge case that a trained professional would have caught, if the
stakes are high (medical -> life or death of a person, legal -> multi-million
dollar lawsuit), clients opt to keep the lawyer (or doctor) in the loop.

For simpler or low-stake workflows though, there is direct selling to the
client (see Clerky).

------
matchagaucho
The most productive teams I work with are using Slack bots to automate several
tasks/notify the team.

Many bots are admittedly experimental, but individuals are empowered to
optimize or unsubscribe from a channel.

------
bsvalley
To answer your question about Software companies, the main process that will
be automated is software development. AI is coming and engineers will be
leaving.

------
shortoncash
Showing up to work.

~~~
lucb1e
I'm assuming this is a joke. Otherwise, let me know (and perhaps elaborate on
what you mean) and sorry for the downvote.

~~~
WillKirkby
I interpreted it as "commuting is a repeated manual process, and thus should
be possible to automate"

------
danraftis
Our company pumps out tons of long-document PDFs that are fairly complex in
terms of text, charts, tables and whatnot. We then take the docs, excel files,
and charts into InDesign to create a nicely designed PDF to upload online.

I need to find a way to automate this workflow. Anyone out there experience
this in their organization and want to work together on something?

~~~
p_ronto
Check out pandoc. With it you could convert your documents into Markdown. Then
use common *nix text-utils to merge the parts you want into a single file and
then load it to InDesign. Check out this article
([http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/](http://rhythmus.be/md2indd/)) that inspired me
to automate protocol specs extraction from Word documents (bluurgh).

------
notwhereyouare
I actually recently mostly automated refund calculations. it's not fully
complete, but it's in the verification stage

------
jasikpark
Cleaning up and organizing data for processing.

~~~
BjoernKW
Can you elaborate?

There are plenty of data cleansing and processing tools. Things like
formatting errors can easily be fixed automatically. Things like "Human
erroneously put a string in a date field in Excel and exported it to CSV."?
Not so much. Errors like that often require bespoke solutions.

------
arpit
Expense tracking

~~~
silasb
I've been using ledger-cli [1] for this. It takes time to reconcile accounts,
but I've been going strong for the last couple months.

[1]: [http://www.ledger-cli.org/](http://www.ledger-cli.org/)

------
mindcrime
I'm working on some marketing automation stuff. Automatically sharing blog
post links to Twitter, etc.

~~~
daw___
If your blog provides an RSS feed then there are many options to choose from
to achieve autoposting to Twitter, first two that come to my mind:

[https://dlvrit.com/](https://dlvrit.com/)

[https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter](https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter)

~~~
mindcrime
Yep. I'm more inclined to roll my own right now though, since I have some very
specific ideas I want to implement and some other use cases to incorporate.
The biggest problem lately has been time. I started down this path sometime
last year, but have been letting it sit on the back-burner for a while, in
favor of focusing on higher priority tasks. _sigh_

~~~
macpatel
What kind of uses cases you have ? I think buffer,hootsuits like paid apps
should be enough to do whatever you want.

------
DougN7
I wish a customer could go to our online order form and press "Price Quote"
instead of "Order" and get a price quote (PDF) that they could give to their
purchasing department. It would only take a few hours to pound out, but there
is always higher priority work.

------
m-p-3
Delegating some rights to some managers in Active Directory. For example allow
them to add or remove access to specific groups in a way that is intuitive to
them.

It would allow us to focus on other stuff, and they would be able to quickly
grant access without waiting after us at all.

------
throwaway1892
Creating Jira accounts and giving them access to the right projects. It's one
of my jobs.

~~~
pknerd
Python/Selenium is your friend. I did something similar in past ;)

~~~
Rondom
Never checked, but I would expect it to have an API for that.

~~~
pknerd
It's a library which you can use in many languages. I use it in Python to
automate many sites.

------
crimsonalucard
Logging jira tempo hours.

------
migueltarga
Coffee Maker

~~~
pknerd
This guy already did this:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-automates-his-
job-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/programmer-automates-his-job-2015-11)

~~~
migueltarga
Yup, but I'll need to automate my mug too..

~~~
Raphmedia
Caffeine pills dispenser at your desk. Everyday at 9h it gives you a pill.

~~~
dbmikus
Just hook me up with an IV drip and call it a day.

~~~
Raphmedia
Overkill. Caffeine can be absorbed by the skin. Make the keyboard and mouse
output a small dose of caffeine during the day. You wouldn't even notice.

------
simplyshift
Eating

~~~
krabpaaltje
Soylent comes close

------
yoshyosh
Creating multiple versions of share images for social media

~~~
janci
This seems to me like a simple tool to do the job. Could you please elaborate
on the requirements?

------
bhaavan
Browsing reddit.

------
luisobo
Offboarding

------
douche
Daily standup meetings.

I'd build a robot, tape a picture of my face onto it, and program it to tromp
over to the conference room, zone out for fifteen minutes as everyone goes
around the circle like it's kindergarten show-and-tell, then read my commit
messages for the day before, the titles of the tickets I've picked out to work
on today, and finish with "No roadblocks".

It'd save me an hour a day in interruptions and wasted time. Now I just need
to build the robot...

~~~
majewsky
We recently switched to holding the daily standup in Slack, using a simple

    
    
      /remind Time for the daily standup! Say what matters and where you need help. everyday at 10 AM
    

(Before, the meeting was in voice chat, not a physical standup since we're at
multiple locations.)

------
Pica_soO
Robotics & PLC Programing:

Automate DEA state creation from CAD-Cell Descriptions, state-transfers and
all-state-covered-automated-proofing- im so sick of all those forgotten states
and the blame that usually gets shifted towards the moving actors aka robots.

~~~
jononor
Is the program based on finite state automata/machines?

------
whenwillitstop
Most of marketing at traditional compnaies can be automated by ML. This is
already happening, but there are huge F500 companies where the employees have
an incentive not to automate.

~~~
jenkstom
There are always incentives not to automate. I think people forget this
sometimes. Look at the cotton gin, there was massive opposition to it.

------
slowm5
transcribing real time notes

