Whether you’re an executive with limited energy or an hourly employee trying to minimize work, the bottleneck in your productivity isn’t time or money but mental effort. And in a digital age where all data can be stored electronically, the most valuable functions of software—especially those in manufacturing applications—are to reduce friction between humans and software as well as between software packages.

For example, any data written on a clipboard can later be transferred to a program. But it will rarely happen unless failure stops production. Myriad machine data can be logged, but if ops managers have to go down to the floor and log in to a machine, they’ll never see it. Even having to open another interface and enter a password will reduce that system’s frequency of use. In essence, any elimination of human processes between machine and machine or between machine and server has the potential to improve the bottom line.

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