Process discovery

The name of a process is usually much simpler than the process itself.

“Process orders.” “Do invoice matching.” “Plan production.” “Follow suppliers.” Each can hide a chain of lookups, document interpretation, local rules, spreadsheets, exceptions and experienced judgement.

That is why understanding the operation is part of building the automation.

Process definition

For each recurring job, establish:

• Trigger - what causes the work to exist: email, file, system event, schedule or person?

• Input - what documents, records or messages arrive?

• Entities - which customer, supplier, product, order, contract or shipment must be resolved?

• Rules - what decisions are deterministic and where are those rules maintained today?

• Judgement - what does an experienced person decide that is not encoded anywhere?

• Systems - where is the authoritative record, and where must the final result be written?

• Exceptions - what causes the ordinary path to stop or branch?

• Outcome - what must be true in the business system for the job to count as complete?

A successful API call or staging write is not automatically the same thing as a completed operational outcome. The business post-condition matters.

Operational terminology

People say “find the customer,” “match the article,” “chase the supplier,” “fit the week on the lines,” “check the invoice,” “book the freight,” or “prove it was delivered.” Those phrases contain useful design information about where the hard part sits.

The process inventory behind these docs is evidence, not a canonical taxonomy. It shows recurring domains and patterns across our target companies, but every implementation still needs to be grounded in that company's systems, rules and people.

See Operational examples for the current non-exhaustive process map.

Source evidence

Operational truth can be distributed across ERP and CRM records, email and supplier correspondence, spreadsheets and local calculations, procedures and contracts, files and engineering documents, interviews and user corrections, and previous execution history.

Those sources do not all carry the same authority. An Agent inference, an old spreadsheet and the current ERP value should not silently become interchangeable.

Distinguish configuration, execution and outcome

Three states are easy to confuse:

1. Configured - a Workflow, schedule or Connection exists.

2. Executed - the run actually happened.

3. Completed operationally - the intended business post-condition is true.

Monitoring can prove execution. The process design should define what proves the business outcome.

Scope

You do not need a perfect enterprise process map before improving anything.

The broader Autonomous Back Office lifecycle is:

Understand -> Automate -> Operate -> Expand

Within a live operation, improvement is continuous: observe what happens, measure the outcome, learn from failures and operator feedback, and feed that evidence into the next reviewed change.

Start with a bounded recurring job, make the evidence and human boundaries explicit, automate it deliberately, operate it against real work, and expand once the capability is dependable enough to extend.