Almost everything needed is already in your head
Before an automation starts you don't need to buy anything, you don't need to prepare a technical document, and you don't even need to know how the software side works, that's the problem of whoever writes it
What drags projects out is almost never the technical part, it's the rules nobody ever put in writing, the ones that sit there quietly as long as a person applies them out of habit, and jump out halfway through the work when the system meets the case nobody had mentioned
Someone inside the company who knows the process
It's the most important item on the whole list, and it's also the easiest one to take for granted
You don't need a manager, you need whoever does the job with their hands, because they're the only one who knows that the supplier up north writes amounts with a dot instead of a comma, and that on Tuesdays the portal is slow so it's better done before nine
That person needs a real half hour, not one carved out between two phone calls, and they need to know the work is being done with them and not against them, otherwise you get the official version, and on the official version an automation doesn't last a week
The logins to the programs and the portals
The system opens the same screens a person opens, so it has to be able to get in the way a person gets in, and this is something to settle beforehand and not halfway through
There aren't many questions to ask, which account the system logs in with, who creates it, who can change it, and what happens to that account when the arrangement ends
In most cases a dedicated account is better than the one belonging to an employee, because then the log inside your business software shows at a glance what the system did and what a person did, but it's a choice that gets agreed and put in writing together, not something that reaches you already decided
A few sample documents, made-up ones are fine
If the job starts from invoices, delivery notes, orders or price lists, we need real examples of the way they arrive, because there's no such thing as the document in theory, there's the document that particular supplier sends you
A whole archive isn't needed, just a few samples of each kind that comes in, and it's better if you put in the one that came out badly too, the crooked scan, the one with the stamp on top of the total
If there's real customer data inside you can cover it up or build a made-up case with the same shape, because what counts is the shape of the document and not the names written on it, and the guide on how to record a video of the process explains the same caution applied to the screen
The odd cases that have already happened
Hardly anybody thinks the odd cases that have already happened are something to prepare, and yet they're the ones that decide whether the automation holds up
Every process has its own collection of exceptions, the order that arrives without a code, the supplier who invoices in advance, the time the portal answered with an error and everything was done by hand, and those exceptions aren't a detail, they're the reason an automation stops instead of guessing
It's enough for whoever does the job to try to remember the last three or four messes, no tidy list is needed, the telling is what's needed, including the shortcuts people use that perhaps nobody ever officially approved
The rules that today live in somebody's head
The rules of the process are yours, the supplier writes them into the system but doesn't decide them, so at some point they have to come out of people's heads and become sentences
They don't have to come out on their own before we begin, don't worry, the way that works is to look at the real cases and pull the rules out of them, but somebody has to be able to say yes, that's how it is, or no, in that case we do it differently
And there's an extra benefit, because at the end the process is written down in black and white, and that sheet is useful to you the day you hire somebody new as well
How much of your time it really takes
Let's do a sum, say half an hour to describe the process, an hour to gather the examples, and half an hour on the logins with whoever looks after the computers
Those two hours are invented, but the proportion is right, what the company is asked for is small, and what makes it big is spreading it over two months because nobody ever has a free hour
What you don't need, so you can stop worrying about it
You don't have to replace your software, you don't need a direct integration between the programs, you don't need your documentation to be in order, and you don't need to know in advance which technical road is the right one
What you need is a process you do often, a person who knows it, and the willingness to describe it as it is, faults included, and the rest we look at together in how it works or straight away on the contact page