The problem isn't a lack of data. It's a lack of time to look for it.
Most COOs know intuitively that their teams spend too much time on tasks that shouldn't require human judgment. The problem isn't unawareness—it's that a formal process audit takes weeks, requires external consultants, and produces a report no one has time to read.
This article proposes something different: a quick estimate, based on three process categories, that any COO can complete in under an hour using information they already have.
This is not an exhaustive diagnostic. It is enough to determine whether a deeper look is warranted.
The three categories where unautomated time accumulates
Experience with mid-size companies in Spain and Latin America consistently shows that recoverable manual time concentrates in three areas:
1. Periodic reporting
Weekly closes, management reports, dashboards that someone builds by hand in Excel or PowerPoint before each leadership meeting. In companies of 50 to 200 people, this process typically involves two to five people spending two to six hours each cycle.
If your company produces a weekly management report and three people each spend three hours on it, the monthly cost of that process is 36 hours of qualified work. Multiply that by the hourly cost of those profiles, and the number becomes material.
2. Data validation and reconciliation
Comparing figures across systems, verifying that ERP data matches a spreadsheet, confirming that orders recorded on one platform correspond to invoices in another. This work is manual, repetitive, and error-prone—but it requires access to multiple systems, which means a person always ends up doing it.
In a company operating across two or more countries, or with multiple business lines, this process can consume between 20 and 50 hours per month distributed across the finance and operations teams.
3. Structured internal coordination
Approval requests, cross-departmental task follow-up, status updates on recurring projects. This is not strategic management: it is the administration of information flows that circulate between people because no system handles them automatically.
This is the hardest category to quantify because it is fragmented into small interruptions throughout the day. But when you add it up—follow-up emails, WhatsApp or Teams messages requesting confirmations, manual updates to shared spreadsheets—the volume is significant.
How to complete the estimate in under an hour
The exercise has three steps:
Step 1: List repetitive processes by area
Ask the heads of finance, operations, and administration to spend ten minutes each listing the three processes that consume the most time for them each week. No detail is required: process name, frequency, and an hour estimate.
Step 2: Classify by category
Assign each process to one of the three categories above. If a process doesn't fit any of them, it likely requires genuine human judgment and is not an immediate automation candidate.
Step 3: Apply a conservative recoverability factor
Not all time spent on a manual process is recoverable. Some portion involves review, judgment, and decision-making. A conservative estimate is that between 50% and 70% of time spent on reporting and validation processes is recoverable through automation. For internal coordination, the range drops to 30–50%.
With those factors applied, most mid-size companies find between 40 and 120 recoverable hours per month in an initial review.
A concrete example
A distribution company with 80 employees and operations in two countries produced a consolidated sales report every Monday. The process involved two members of the finance team spending four hours each: they downloaded data from two separate systems, unified it in Excel, applied manual validations, and built the report in PowerPoint.
Eight hours per week. Thirty-two hours per month. Given the profiles involved, the estimated direct cost was between EUR 1,200 and EUR 1,800 per month—not counting the opportunity cost of those people doing higher-value work.
With a reporting agent connected to both systems, the report now generates automatically every Monday before 8:00 a.m. The finance team reviews and validates it in twenty minutes. The time recovered was approximately 28 hours per month within the first six weeks.
This is not an exceptional case. It is the most common pattern we encounter in companies of this size.
Why this exercise matters now
Margin pressure on mid-size companies is not going to ease. Competitors already operating with automated processes have a different cost structure, and that difference compounds month after month.
The question is not whether to automate. It is what to automate first and by what prioritization criteria.
The exercise described here does not fully answer that question, but it does allow you to enter a diagnostic conversation with your own data rather than intuitions. That changes the quality of the decision.
Conclusion
A formal process audit has its place, but it is not the necessary first step. With three categories, one hour of work, and conservative estimates, any COO can develop a reasonable hypothesis about the recoverable time in their operation.
If the result of that exercise exceeds 40 hours per month, a deeper look is worthwhile. If you want to do that with someone who has run this analysis at companies similar to yours, the diagnostic form is available at the bottom of this page. No introductory call required. No commitment.
