Every business has a Sarah. Sometimes she's called Dave. She's the person who knows that the orders come in on the website, get copied into the stock system, then typed into the accounts, then pasted into a spreadsheet for the Monday meeting.
Nobody designed it that way. It grew. And because it's spread across a few minutes here and half an hour there, nobody notices how much of the week it eats.
Why it hides
Copying between systems never appears on a list of problems because:
- Nobody owns it. It's a bit of everybody's job.
- It works. The data gets there in the end.
- It's quick, each time. Five minutes doesn't feel like a problem. Five minutes, forty times a week, across three people, is.
How to find it
For one week, ask everyone to keep a note every time they:
- Type in something that already exists somewhere else.
- Chase someone for something a system could have told them.
- Build a report or a list by hand.
Don't make it a big exercise. A sticky note is fine. At the end of the week, add it up.
You'll find two or three jobs that account for most of it. Usually they're the same shape: two systems that should be talking to each other and aren't.
What to do about it
Most of the time you don't need new software. The systems you already pay for can usually be connected, and nobody has done it because nobody's job is to do it.
Join them up, so the information exists once and flows to where it's needed. Then Sarah can do the job she was hired for.
If you'd rather add it up now than wait a week, the time-leak audit does the sum in about three minutes.