Every business has processes that have simply always been done a certain way, and because no single instance of the task feels costly, the cumulative cost never gets calculated. A few patterns show up repeatedly across industries.
Manual data re-entry is the most common: a customer's details typed into an order system, then retyped into an accounting system, then retyped again into a delivery spreadsheet. Each retype is an opportunity for error, and the cumulative staff time across hundreds of transactions a month is usually far higher than anyone estimates until it's measured.
Approval chains conducted over chat or email are another quiet cost — requests that get lost in a thread, approved verbally but never recorded, or delayed simply because the approver was traveling and didn't see the message. A simple structured approval workflow, even a modest one, tends to compress these delays significantly.
Reconciliation — matching records between two systems that should agree but don't automatically sync — is a third pattern, and often the most expensive, since it usually involves a skilled staff member spending hours on work that adds no value beyond confirming numbers match. Any process where a person exists mainly to bridge two systems that don't talk to each other is a strong automation candidate.