The ten-minute phone call that ends the discussion
You call your software vendor's support line and explain that you'd like to stop retyping by hand the documents that arrive every day. At the other end there's a polite person who hears you out, then tells you that no, that can't be done
You hang up and the discussion dies there. That person is the one who knows the program from the inside, so there isn't much you can say back, and the job goes back onto the desk of whoever was doing it before, who carries on doing it
That answer, though, as it stands, tells you almost nothing. Before you take it as final, ask yourself which question it was answering
What that no usually means
When your software vendor says it can't be done, he's often telling you one of four things, and they are very different from each other even though they come out in the same words
- It can't be done with my product, meaning the program has no feature built for what you're asking. That's true, but it's about the program, not about your work
- It isn't covered by the contract you signed, so you leave support behind and step into development work, which is a commercial question, not a technical one
- It could be done, but the development queue is long and your case is a single one, while requests that serve every customer go first. From where they stand, that choice has its own logic
- It really can't be done, and that happens, because there are genuine constraints. This is the only one of the four that closes the door
None of these answers is dishonest. Somebody working in support answers for the piece of the world he can see, which is his product and his contract, not the process that runs in your office
A missing integration is not missing work
The confusion nearly always starts here. When people talk about automating business software they think straight away of a direct integration between programs, a side door another piece of software walks through to fetch the data, the thing they call an API, and if that door isn't there it all looks over
Except that the work you want to take away doesn't go through any side door. It's done by a person sitting in front of a screen, who opens the document, reads, types, checks and saves, and that screen exists, it works, and it's there every day
Muffin Suite works exactly there, driving that screen the way an operator would and stopping when a value doesn't add up, and it's what we do best precisely because programs with no direct integration at all are the ones where manual work sticks around longest
If a person can do the work with a keyboard, you can nearly always describe it, and what you can describe you can automate, whatever the vendor's price list happens to cover
The questions to ask again, calmly
Before you close the case there's more you can ask that same person, and nobody takes offense at these questions
- Whether a direct integration exists, even a paid one, and what exactly it covers, because if it's there and already available it's worth using, it's sturdier than going through the screens
- Whether anything can be exported, a file, a data layout, a list, because even a plain export is a place to start
- Whether there are constraints on the license or on the user accounts to keep in mind if somebody automates the screens
The answers to those three questions are worth more than a generic no, and if the vendor bristles simply because you're asking, that reaction tells you something about him too
When the no is well founded, and it happens
There are cases where that stays the right answer. When the work depends on the judgment of the person looking at it and not on a rule you can write down, when every case has its own story and nobody can explain how the decision gets made, or when the volumes are so low that you'd never win back the time spent putting the rules in writing
A serious supplier tells you so, and anyone who promises you that everything can always be automated is selling you hours, not results
How you check it properly
The only way to know whether the no you got was the first kind or the fourth is to look at your own case, which program you use, which steps the person goes through from start to finish, how many times a month it comes up, and what happens when an awkward one arrives, which is more or less what we need to know to show you how it starts
From there it's quick to see whether there's something to be done, and if there isn't, you deserve to hear it before you spend, not after