"if you digitise and automate a shit manual process/cottage industry it becomes a shit digital process"
It's ALWAYS worth analying every step along the way anf find out the hostory of why something that doesn't make sense is included in the process.
It's usually a hangover from kludging around something broken that was fixed decades ago. Once you can point that out it's easier to get buy in on changes
Another thing to bear in mind is that apart from management's near patholigical need to see people "busy"(*), people themselves don't like twiddling their thumbs and anything which halves their time to do a task may result in pushback unless there are other ways to keep them occupied
(*) This applies to maintenance staff in partucular. The guys you see sitting around playing cards are "on call" waiting for something to break. If they are able to play cards all shift then something is going right(**) The guys you can't find when you go to their office may be down a hole somewhere clearing out drains or in a roof inspecting for rot. They're seldom skiving off in the bogs as many micromanagers seem to believe
(**) This applies to things like backup systems too. My robots had 6 tape drives and a hundred slots, not to speed up backups but to ensure rapid restores when the shit did hit the fan. The mangler who only sees 2 drives and 8 slots in use on a daily basis overlooks that requirement