Who Maintains the Automation When Something in Your Company Changes

The most important question before you commission an automation is not whether it works. On acceptance day it almost always does. The question is what happens when something inside your company changes, and who has to act when it does.

An automation is never finished. It ages. And it ages at exactly those points where somebody typed a piece of information straight into a step instead of putting it somewhere it can be found again later.

What sits hard wired inside an automation

Nearly every process carries values that look like technology but actually describe your organisation. The mail address a fault report goes to. The folder documents get filed in. A tax rate inside a formula. The amount above which an order needs approval. A department name in a subject line. The customer number collective bookings run under.

While building, this feels right. An address is needed, the address is typed in, the test run comes back clean. The value is even correct on that day. It only becomes wrong once the world around it moves and nobody remembers that the automation knows this value.

The uncomfortable part is that nothing breaks. An automation reporting into a mailbox nobody reads any more still reports successfully. A tax rate that has been outdated since a legal change still calculates without error. There is no failure for a log to show. There is only a result nobody checks.

When such a value goes wrong in your company

The triggers are well known and none of them is unusual. Somebody leaves or moves to another department. Responsibilities get recut. A supplier or a bank changes its numbering. A rate, a fee or a deadline changes at the turn of the year. A folder is renamed during a clean up. A second site is added and works with different thresholds.

Expect several dozen such values in a company with a grown process landscape. That is an estimate rather than a measurement, but in doubt it is more likely too low than too high.

Why this is a cost question before you sign

How many of these values sit inside your process does not decide whether the automation works. It decides what every later change costs and who you need for it.

If the values sit in one central place, a change of responsibility is one entry in a table. If they are scattered across twenty individual steps, the same change becomes a small assignment to your supplier, including searching, testing and an invoice. That is the difference between an automation you own and one where you have to call somebody for every trifle.

And here the interests part ways. A supplier billing by the hour suffers no disadvantage from scattered values. A supplier delivering at a fixed price and handing the system over does.

What the statement of work should say

Insist on three things before you sign.

First, a single list of every value that can change. Call it a configuration sheet, a parameter list or a master sheet, the name does not matter. What matters is that one page exists holding addresses, thresholds, rates, deadlines and target folders, and that the automation reads that page instead of carrying the values inside itself.

Second, a clear line between what you may change yourself and what you may not. You change values. The supplier changes logic. That separation protects both sides, because it stops somebody in daily business from quietly moving a condition with nobody able to explain afterwards why the process behaves differently.

Third, a named owner on your side. A list without an owner goes stale exactly like a hard wired value. It is enough for one person to walk through that single page once a year, ideally tied to a date that exists anyway, such as year end accounts or budget planning.

What to know about maintenance cost

Maintenance and subscription get mixed up regularly, and they are two different things. A subscription pays for access to something that keeps running. Maintenance pays for work somebody actually performs when something changes.

So do not ask for a maintenance package. Ask for two figures. What does a typical value change cost, a new recipient or a new threshold? And what does a typical adjustment cost, an additional field in one of the connected systems? If the first figure is zero because you can do it yourself, the automation is well built.

A supplier unwilling to name that first figure is not selling you an automation. They are selling you a dependency.

What this means for comparing proposals

Two proposals for the same automation can differ by a wide margin, and the difference often lies not in the price but in what happens after acceptance. So do not compare project prices alone. Add the change effort you can reasonably expect across three years. Five to ten changes in that period is a cautious assumption for a process that touches live business.

Sophera Consulting collects these values into one configuration sheet before anything is built, and hands it over together with documentation and access credentials. Value changes are then yours to make, with no subscription and no need to ask, because they are part of the handover. The entry point is the free automation check.

The recommendation

Ask a single question before you commission anything. Which pieces of information inside this process can change within the next three years, and where will they be stored?

If the answer is a list and a location, you are dealing with somebody who thought about the time after acceptance. If the answer is that this can easily be adjusted later, you now know who will be invoicing that adjustment.