Recently I wrote about why it’s good to automate and how automation can help you learn software and improve its design. There are other good reasons for automating beyond the obvious benefits of saving time and money.

Documentation: Automation scripts are the ultimate way to document a process. A script that automates a process describes how to carry it out properly. Businesses need to document all their manual processes so that other people can carry out the task. By scripting the process it is being described at the same time. As well as saving time by automating it, it is also now easy for someone else to see how the process is carried out.

Contingency: Contingency goes hand in hand with documentation. If only one person in the organisation knows how to carry out a task there will be problems if and when that person is sick, on vacation, or leaves the company. Not all absences are planned. By documenting a process the business is ensuring that someone else can carry it out should the usual task owner be unavailable. Automation takes that one stage further. If the process is scripted and automated it is easy for someone else to take on ownership of the task in the future. The task will continue to run and the script itself describes how the task works.