Another thing that can happen in this stage is that you’ll identify processes that can be automated. Once a process is well understood and the decision-making logic can be encoded in software or hardware, it’s a potential candidate for automation. Forecasting and purchasing are two examples of processes that were eventually automated at Amazon. It took years of collaborative effort among category buyers and software engineers—and involving plenty of trial and error—to automate the forecasting and purchasing decisions across the hundreds of millions of products in Amazon’s catalog. But it’s now
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