Report

AI in Indirect Areas: The KAIZEN™ Approach to Real Results

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Most companies have already tried AI. They ran a pilot, saw a promising demo, and then watched it quietly fade once the initial enthusiasm wore off. The pilot ran for a few weeks, the person responsible for it changed roles, and the team drifted back to the old spreadsheet.

It’s tempting to call that an adoption problem. It isn’t. It’s a question of who owns the work once the tools are in place.

Why more tools haven’t produced better results

The most powerful AI models on the market are already available to almost everyone, yet the results inside most organizations remain thin.

The reason is that the hard part was never the model. It’s implementation: getting AI into the actual flow of work, fixing the process before layering technology on top of it, and making the change stick after the consultants leave.

This is especially true in indirect areas. Finance, HR, commercial, supply chain support, compliance, and other office-based functions run on transactional work and on the handoffs between teams. Automating a broken process only scales the dysfunction. When the underlying workflow is redesigned first, the same automation that would have failed suddenly compounds, freeing capacity that can be redirected toward work that genuinely needs a human.

Fix the process before you automate it

The mechanism is straightforward to describe and demanding to execute: simplify, digitalize, then automate.

First, remove the steps that shouldn’t exist. Then take the remaining paper-based work out of scattered emails and spreadsheets. Only then does automation get applied, and only where it produces measurable return.

Skipping the first two steps is how organizations end up with twelve automated steps when five would have done the job. The result is a habit built into how the work gets done, not a poster on the wall or a project that ends the moment attention shifts elsewhere.