The five-minute check that costs 1,400 hours
Small repeated checks can consume substantial capacity, but their accumulated cost should prompt investigation rather than automatic removal.
Suppose an employee spends five minutes checking something before processing an order. Would you launch an improvement project? Probably not. Five minutes is trivial. Now suppose that check happens 15 times a day across five employees. Across 230 working days, the organisation spends more than 1,400 hours performing it. The activity has not changed. Our unit of analysis has. I call this accumulation: individually insignificant activity becoming organisationally significant through repetition. It appears everywhere. A quick check. A small correction. A brief telephone call. Copying something into another system. Looking up information.
Chasing somebody for an answer. Each occurrence feels too small to matter. Collectively, they can represent substantial organisational capacity. That does not mean the 1,400 hours are automatically available as a saving. This is important. Perhaps the check prevents expensive mistakes. Perhaps it compensates for unreliable data. Perhaps an experienced employee is recognising something the formal system cannot. Removing the activity simply because the arithmetic looks attractive could make the process worse. The calculation should trigger a question, not a conclusion: Why does the organisation need to perform this check at all?
Perhaps the underlying data needs improving. Perhaps information is captured incorrectly earlier in the process. Perhaps the check genuinely creates value and should remain. The point is to investigate. AI and automation make this particularly relevant because repeated micro-activities are tempting automation targets. And sometimes they should be automated. But making a five-minute check take five seconds is not necessarily the same as solving the reason the check exists. Before automating repetitive work, therefore, calculate its accumulation. Then investigate its cause. The most valuable opportunity may not be performing the activity faster. It may be creating a system in which nobody needs to perform it at all.