Look for repetition and handoffs
Walk through a process with the people who do it. Note the steps that are repeated every day, the places where information is copied from one system to another and the points where work waits for someone to pass it on. These are the usual sources of lost time and errors.
Simplify before automating
Automating a confusing process makes it faster, but still confusing. Remove unnecessary steps and approvals first. What remains is easier to automate and easier to explain to the team.
Choose by value and effort
How often is the task performed?
How long does it take each time, and how many people are involved?
How often do errors occur, and what do they cost?
How stable are the rules? A process that changes every month is hard to automate.
Keep people in the loop
Automation should handle the routine cases and send exceptions to a person with enough context to resolve them quickly. A clear route for exceptions is what makes an automated process trustworthy.
Plan for ownership
Every automated process needs an owner who understands what it does, a record of how it works and a way to be notified when it fails. Without this, small changes in a connected system can quietly break the process.
Done this way, automation does not need to be large. A handful of well-chosen processes can free up a surprising amount of time.