The Inflection Point

Businesses go through many phases of growth. I’m data professional, not a business management consultant, but I’ve seen what goes on in plenty of places. As a smaller business grows, certain processes that were manageable and easy enough to do manually become cumbersome and unsustainable. Whether this be daily and weekly internal reporting, or business processes that deliver a product or service to customers.

I see it quite a bit, a senior person saying ‘its no big deal, it only takes me 15 minutes or so a day to do it’. Eventually these 15 minute tasks add up, or other, more pressing tasks come up and these BAU processes slip into the backlog. Daily insights drift to weekly or monthly. Soon the weight of repeated manual processes makes the business feel bloated and sluggish.

I don’t know when the perfect point to start ensuring processes are streamlined and automated is. I think it is likely for each business. It can be difficult to fully automate a process, so it is understandable to not make it a priority when a business is first finding its feet. Wait too long, and soon there are just large excel files floating around on sharepoint somewhere that may or may not have the answer you need.