The automation snowball effect refers to the way automation can quickly and exponentially grow in an organization once it’s introduced. The automation snowball starts as a small change that has an impact on productivity: management sees cost and time savings, so they introduce more automation. Freeing up more time and saving more money…and the automation snowball keeps rolling downhill.

Let’s take a look at a few examples of what I mean.  You could for instance use Zapier to automate GMail and download attachments from incoming emails into OneDrive or Google Drive. Now, instead of having to not only go through the process to download each and every attachment, you now have all of your attachments in a central location.

Not bad, but let’s take this further. Rather than dump them all into one folder, let’s save them into folders based on the “from” name. Now, I have my attachments sorted to make it a bit easier to find stuff. Of course now, I can create additional automations to work with the attachments that are now being saved to OneDrive. Maybe I get a list of products with price updates. You could update a master spreadsheet with this information.

Do you see the power of the automation snowball effect? Little by little, I took a simple automation and built upon it to eliminate work I had to do, which didn’t add to my bottom line. The goal of automation is to use the power of technology to enable businesses to be more productive.  Let technology handle the dull work that it excels at and free you to do your best work. 

So, start asking yourself whenever you work on a task if a computer could do it.  If the answer is “yes,” then take a moment to see if there is a tool you can use to automate it.  If you need help in this process, then reach out to me at 207-740-5709 or email me at wwade@dirigosoftwaresolutions.com.  I have years of experience helping businesses to find these everyday automations and I know I can help you as well.