Updated 30 October 2026

A company of two hundred people can have several good systems and still spend hours retyping data and hunting for information. Before you buy another tool, walk one real case from start to finish. It takes a few hours and often changes the brief.

Pick a completed order

A procedure document shows how work should run. You need to know how it did run. Take a typical order from last month and find out who picked it up, what they needed and what they waited for. Look in emails and spreadsheets too, and at where people dealt with exceptions.

Talk to the people who do the work. Leadership is often convinced that data moves automatically. The administrator knows they retype it every morning.

Follow the handovers

Most time is usually lost not within departments but between them.

Illustrative example: a customer changes an order date. Sales records it, planning has to pick it up and dispatch needs to know whether to change transport. If nobody has defined how the change is passed on and confirmed, each department works from a different picture. The error then surfaces at the customer.

What to measure

  • Total time: from request to completion.
  • Active work: how much of that someone was actually working. The rest is waiting.
  • Manual handovers: how many times the same data was retyped.
  • Rework: what came back and why.
  • Frequency: how many times a month it happens. Ten minutes on a rare exception weighs differently from ten minutes on every order.

Then convert time into money, including delays, errors and unused capacity. But released time isn’t a saving until it shows up in the company’s results.

Name the cause

The same symptom can have different causes, and each leads to a different solution:

  • Unclear ownership: nobody owns the process as a whole. A named owner and a rule will help, not software.
  • Unused function: the system can do it, but nobody set it up or knows about it.
  • Missing connection: the data exists, but people carry it between systems.
  • Missing capability: no system can do what’s needed. Here a new tool may be the right answer.

Compare the options

Sometimes it’s enough to change a rule or use a function you already have. Sometimes integration, automation or a new system makes sense. The comparison should include implementation, operation, control and your own people’s time, not just the licence price.

New software can improve quality, traceability or security even if it removes no manual handover. That’s fine. What matters is naming the expected change in advance.

Three questions before you sign

  • What specific problem are we solving and what does it cost us today?
  • Who will take responsibility for the whole process?
  • How will we recognise improvement and when will we review it?

How we approach this at ENTER

This is exactly how the Audit starts. With the whole leadership team, not just the CEO, we walk through real cases and name the bottlenecks. The output is a map, a baseline for measurement and a proposal for what to change first. Sometimes that’s a rule or work with people, sometimes integration. Only then does it make sense to talk about tools.

Related: Audit · How we measure · Discuss a specific process