01 · Friday, 4:40 p.m.
Your coordinator is retyping submittals into Procore. Again.
The PDFs came in this morning. Procore is open in the next window. For the rest of the afternoon, one person will move the same numbers from one screen to the other, field by field.
Last Friday went the same way. So will the next one.
Across town, a clinic's billing lead is copying authorization numbers from the payer portal into the scheduling system, one at a time, because the two systems do not share data.
Robot work is any task a person repeats by hand that software should be doing.
You already pay for the software. A person is still doing the part it should do.
Construction
- Copying invoice lines from email into the accounting system.
- Rebuilding the weekly owner report from the same four sources.
- Re-entering bid tabs from BuildingConnected into a spreadsheet.
Behavioral health
- Compiling the monthly compliance report from session notes.
- Re-keying intake forms from paper into the EHR.
02 · What it costs you
The person doing robot work is the person you cannot afford to lose.
Nobody was hired to retype. They were hired for their judgment, and the retyping takes the hours that judgment needs.
A typo in the fourth hour of retyping can turn into a dispute in month three. The owner report that took all of Monday is out of date by Tuesday.
You can buy your way out of this, one task at a time, at a price an operations lead can approve without a meeting.