One of the easiest things to find in a business is a process that could be improved. That does not automatically make it a good investment.

Most established businesses contain some degree of inefficiency. They include repetitive tasks, manual workarounds, duplicated effort, and systems that could probably be used more effectively. The useful question is not simply whether a process could be improved, but whether improving it would create enough value to justify the cost, effort and disruption involved.

That is where I think operational improvement needs to become a commercial exercise rather than a technical one.

Turn frustration into a number.

If someone tells me a particular workflow “wastes loads of time”, I want to quantify what that actually means. I’d look at how many people are involved, how often the process happens, how much time it consumes and what that staff capacity costs the business over a meaningful period.

There is a big difference between a task employees find irritating and a process that consumes the equivalent of £28,000 of staff capacity every year. Both may be inefficient, but only one immediately gives management something concrete to evaluate.

Putting a number against the problem changes the conversation. Instead of debating whether a workflow feels cumbersome, you can start asking whether the cost of improving it is proportionate to the value you are likely to recover.

The cost of the solution matters just as much.

Suppose an inefficient workflow is consuming around £28,000 of staff capacity each year. If a £5,000 change could release a meaningful proportion of that capacity, the commercial case may be very attractive.

If solving the same problem would require a £50,000 project, the decision looks different. The problem has not become less real, but the return on fixing it may be weaker, particularly if other operational issues elsewhere in the business could be improved more cheaply and deliver a stronger result.

That is why I don't think every inefficiency should automatically become a project. A business can easily spend a great deal of money improving processes that were never commercially important enough to justify the investment.

Prioritisation is where the real value sits.

It is relatively easy to walk through a business and identify things that could be automated, integrated or redesigned. In many organisations, the list would be long.

The more useful work is deciding which of those opportunities to tackle first. That means comparing the scale of the problem, the cost of the proposed solution, the likely benefit, and the disruption involved in making the change.

Some improvements are small and inexpensive but release a surprising amount of capacity; others require significant investment but remove a major constraint on growth, and some are genuine problems that aren’t important enough to act on yet.

That prioritisation is what turns an operational review into something commercially useful.

AI does not change the basic economics.

I think this is particularly important in conversations about AI and automation.

New technology makes more things technically possible, but technical possibility is not the same as commercial value. A workflow might suit AI, automation, or system integration, but that doesn't mean the business should implement the solution just because it can.

The same questions still apply. What is the current problem costing? How much value could realistically be recovered? What will the solution cost to implement and maintain? Are there other problems in the business with a stronger return?

AI may improve the answer to some operational problems. It does not remove the need to judge whether those problems are worth solving in the first place.

Look at return, not novelty.

This is why I prefer to understand the cost of the problem before getting excited about the solution.

If a business has several inefficient workflows, I would rather rank them by commercial impact than by how interesting the technology might be. A relatively unglamorous process change that releases hundreds of hours of staff capacity can be more valuable than a sophisticated AI project with little measurable effect on the business.

Operational improvement should ultimately be about return.

The objective is not to fix everything that could be better. It is to identify the improvements that are most likely to justify the investment.