5 steps to intelligent automation
By Matthew Chang | Published: 2025-10-28 17:51:00 | Source: Inc.com
When you’re looking to add automation to an existing factory or fulfillment space, it’s important to understand what you can and can’t achieve within a reasonable cost and timeline. This requires evaluating current automation and what automation is possible with further development.
This is the time for extreme care. Investing time and money into automation when there is no known return or risk can lead to wasted efforts and worse. Ultimately, a failed effort can leave a bad impression of automation on the team and broader leadership for years (or even decades) to come.
To avoid these pitfalls, here are five steps I developed with our chief corporate engineer, Philip Blackwelder, to help guide your own facility to intelligent automation outcomes.
1. Understand the feasibility
Understanding the true feasibility and expected cost is the first step. Although fully automating processes may be your initial desire, it may be better to treat it as a long-term process. In the near term, some steps may be better served by manual or semi-automated processes while waiting for technologies and equipment to be developed further. Focus initially on areas where you can implement low-risk automation sooner, with a higher guarantee of success, and at an accessible cost.
2. Build a master plan
Next, explore the available options and develop a system for assigning a score to each in terms of urgency, cost, and complexity of implementation to help crystallize your feasibility decisions. With your score sheet in hand, develop a master plan that not only includes lower-level automation but also takes into account the higher-level systems that will properly manage the automation and ways to integrate new procedures with existing ERP and plant control systems.
The exact arrangement matters less than ensuring your automation is designed to minimize future modifications that may add unexpected costs and complexity.
3. Focus on major victories
Once the master plan and control structure are complete, your next step is to focus on key wins, which can include reduced labor, increased overall equipment effectiveness, and better control of operations.
Areas that require more complex solutions or involve higher risks should be prioritized according to the organization’s preferences. Identifying the right people and resource teams to lead these challenges is also critical.
Custom solutions adapt to your existing processes, while off-the-shelf solutions may require you to adapt your processes to fit the software. Carefully evaluate both approaches to find the right balance for your team and set clear metrics to measure success.
4. Risk management and timing
Next, remember that downstream influences such as packaging and product type restrictions can affect other parts of the process. This is the time to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment at different stages to ensure that all stakeholders are able to understand and prepare for the expected or unforeseen consequences of automation efforts.
The time it will take to implement the automation is another important factor. Time may be difficult to determine in early analysis, but the potential impacts of time on cost and operation may drive the choice or be a barrier to implementation. It is therefore important to carefully align automation projects within the broader organizational roadmap. For example, if the product cycle is shorter than the actual execution timeline to create it, automation will be wasted effort or even a negative cost. Make sure to evaluate these issues at the planning stage.
5. Build the right team and culture
Choosing the right partners and identifying key internal resources and stakeholders is the final step to help you mitigate complexity and risk. While you may be able to tackle many challenges independently, challenges that involve multiple systems or departments will require a focus on identifying the ideal partners, team, and leadership to ensure their success.
Final thoughts
Adding the initial time to doing these five steps well has its own implications, of course. But ensuring these five steps happen early is the ideal way to ensure smooth, consistent automation that sets everyone involved up for success.
With our experience at Chang Robotics, we help organizations of all sizes work through each of these steps. In doing so, we can see that intelligent automation is less about rushing to install technology and more about creating a roadmap that balances feasibility, cost, risk and long-term strategy.
In your process, look for partners who can support you at every stage of the journey from feasibility to implementation to measurement and reporting to ensure that everything you automate will create real, sustainable value for your customers, employees and business results.
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