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Ten real processes · measured on the insideWhat I come across inside companies in the Canary Islands: what gets done by hand, what it costs, whether it can be fixed and when it isn't worth touching.
The times are measured with a clock, not estimated. Three of the ten have a negative verdict, and that's exactly why they're here.
4 ha month · 120 apartments
The details go into the PMS when the booking is made and are typed in again, in full, for the guest registration. The data already exists: it just has to be carried over. On its own it isn't enough for a project; it goes inside another one.
With caveats×4the same fault, every year
The guest reports it, someone reads it, someone calls the plumber. At the end of the month nobody knows how many there were or which ones keep coming back. The expensive part isn't the time: it's paying four times to repair the same water heater.
Fixable72 ha month · 1,000 invoices
It gets opened, checked against the order line by line and entered into the ERP by hand. It's the best-solved case on this list and the one that pays for itself soonest. With fewer than 150 invoices a month, don't touch it yet.
Fixable½ dayper container
Someone splits the AIEM and IGIC across product lines in a spreadsheet only they understand, and that spreadsheet decides the month's margin. What you're buying here isn't time: it's no longer depending on one person.
Fixable1 ha day, at reception
The last hour of the day goes on calling tomorrow's appointments, and the ones who don't pick up are the ones who don't turn up. It's cheap to automate, but if the patient replies «I can't make it», someone has to read it.
Fixable5 minper patient
Print, sign, scan, upload to the record and keep the paper just in case. It's worth it for the filing cabinet, not for the five minutes. It's health data: it's done properly or not at all.
With caveats½ dayof one person · 20 workers
It's filled in by hand on site and reaches the office on Friday, or the Friday after. It's the one on this list that fails most, and not because of the technology: because it gets set up without setting foot on a site. No signal, gloves on and in a hurry.
With caveatsNo traceof what was ordered or at what price
A voice note to the warehouse guy. It works until you have to prove what was ordered, when and at what price. Changing the habit costs more than setting it up, so this isn't the first thing to touch.
Partly2 peoplefull-time in closing week
Crooked photos, duplicates, with a finger over them. Someone sorts them, names them and enters them into the program. The most urgent on the list because of e-invoicing, and clients need showing how.
Fixable3 hper set of minutes · 80 meetings a year
Notes are taken, typed up that night, laid out and sent, almost always out of hours. The best first project for a firm: cheap, visible and noticeable the same month. The minutes are always reviewed by a person.
FixableThe invoice-reading project, taken apart: the real numbers and the three mistakes I made along the way.
A distributor in Tenerife, 34 people, between 900 and 1,100 supplier invoices a month as PDFs. Two people opened them, checked the lines against the order and entered them into the ERP. We timed a week with a stopwatch: 4 minutes 20 seconds on average.
The invoice comes in, the data is extracted and checked against the order and the delivery note, and if it matches it goes in on its own. Whatever doesn't match stops and appears in a tray. That last part is the one almost nobody builds and the one that makes it work.
A supplier changed its PDF format and for two days we entered the due date wrongly; a person spotted it, not the system. I said six weeks and it took nine, because of four suppliers who invoiced from a fax. And I set up the alerts by email, where nobody read them.
96 out of every 100 invoices go in on their own. The remaining four are checked by a person, which is what should happen: they're the ones with a price that doesn't match or a quantity that never arrived. The two people in admin are still there.
I publish the failures because that's what makes the successes credible.
Tell me about it in eight fields and I'll send you back, in writing, what can be removed, in what order and roughly what it would cost.