Everyone Routes Around It: Why Your “Impossible” Step Deserves a Retest

There is a step in shrimp processing called deheading. It is exactly what it sounds like, and it is the single biggest thing standing between US producers and real scale. No commercial machine does it well. So the industry does not do it — it routes around it. Sells product with the heads on and tells customers that is how it comes. Ships to where hand labor is cheap. Builds an entire operating model around one step nobody could automate.

What interests me is not that the step is hard. It is that almost nobody in the industry is working on it anymore. At some point a genuine technical constraint quietly turned into a fact of life, and once that happens people stop bringing it up.

The workaround becomes the process

This is the part worth stealing for your own business. A workaround starts as a temporary accommodation for a real limit. Then it runs for a few years. New people get trained into it, and nobody ever tells them it was a workaround — to them it is just how the job is done. It stops appearing in planning because it is not a problem anymore. It has become the furniture.

You can hear it in the language. “That part has to be manual.” “You can’t really automate that.” “Someone has to eyeball it.” Those sentences are almost always true when first said. The question nobody asks is when they were first said.

Your assumption has a date on it

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Most companies formed their sense of what software can and cannot do somewhere between five and fifteen years ago, usually after one bad experience with a tool that overpromised. That belief has been sitting on the shelf ever since, and nothing about the intervening years has been applied to it.

Meanwhile the capability moved — particularly for the messy, judgment-shaped tasks that used to be the reason a step needed a person. Reading a document that arrives in twelve different formats. Sorting inbound requests that do not follow a template. Pulling the same three fields out of a supplier email written by a human being in a hurry. Those were genuinely out of reach. Now they are frequently the easiest thing in the building to automate. The belief did not move with the capability, so the step stayed manual on the strength of a test somebody ran in 2018.

How to find yours

Ask your team for the list of things that have to be done by hand. You will get it quickly, because everyone knows. Then, for each one, ask a different question: when did we last actually test that? Not discuss it — test it. If nobody can name a date inside the last two years, you are not looking at a constraint. You are looking at an old conclusion nobody has revisited. That is a different problem, and a much cheaper one.

Start with the step that has the most people queued behind it, which is usually the same one described as “just how it works here.” It tends to be the obvious automation nobody builds, hiding behind a belief instead of behind the work. If nothing on the list survives the question, good — that is a real answer, and now you can go find your first use case somewhere it will actually pay.

I want to be straight about the limit here. Some constraints are real, and deheading is still genuinely hard — I am not claiming every impossible step has quietly become possible. I am claiming you have not checked. Those are different problems, and only one of them is expensive to keep believing.