In almost every business I come across, people retype data from one system into another. Out of the inbox and into the CRM, out of the CRM and into the accounts, out of the accounts and into a spreadsheet. It costs time, it introduces errors, and it drains energy. The good news: it doesn't have to be this way any more.
Take a walk through your own office. Chances are you'll spot someone retyping an address from an email into the CRM. Someone keying invoice lines from one system into the accounts. Someone updating a spreadsheet in the evening because two systems don't hold the same truth. I call this 'the retyping problem', and it's tucked away inside almost every organisation.
Most businesses run on a handful of separate systems. A CRM for the customers, an accounting package for the invoices, perhaps an ERP for stock, the inbox for appointments, and around all of that a long row of spreadsheets tying everything together. Each one a perfectly good system. They just don't talk to each other.
So people do that work. They read something on one screen and retype it into another. All day long, at every step of the process. It feels like normal work, because that's how it's been done for years. But it's really nothing more than moving the same data over and over again, by hand. And let's be honest: nobody was born to do that, right?
This is nobody's fault. Businesses grow in steps, and with each step another system arrives. You start with an accounting package, then a CRM joins because you've won more customers, then a planning tool, then something else for stock. Each system was once chosen to do one thing well, and it does.
But nobody ever deliberately chose the space in between. That just appeared. And people fill that space with their own time: a quick retype, a quick copy-paste, a quick update to a list. Meanwhile the administrative burden piles up too, because alongside the systems, rules and regulations keep asking for ever more record-keeping.
The 'retyping problem' leads to three kinds of cost. First, time: hours spent on work that adds nothing. Second, errors: every time a person copies something across, a digit or a comma can slip or a letter or word can land just slightly wrong, and that error travels on through the rest of the process. And third, perhaps most important of all, energy. It's boring work, and it wears out the very people you hired for the real work.
And we're talking serious volumes. Research shows that most working people lose a sizeable chunk of their day to exactly this: moving data from one system to another by hand.
Every time a person retypes data, you're moving the same information all over again. That's work you can spare your people.
The answer isn't yet another new system. The answer is making your existing systems talk to each other. The CRM, the accounts, the inbox, the spreadsheet: we connect them, so that data already known somewhere isn't entered by hand all over again. You type it once (or better still, you read it off automatically just once, from an email or a website, say), and it appears everywhere it belongs.
And where it helps, we bring AI alongside. Not because AI is a fashion, but because it's genuinely good at exactly this kind of work: reading an email and lifting out the right fields, recognising an invoice, placing a line in the right spot. People stay in charge and keep oversight, the machine does the retyping. The handwork disappears, and your people keep their energy for the work they're actually good at and enjoy.
We always start practically, with a conversation. We come and sit beside you, look at how the work actually flows today, and find the spot where the retyping costs the most time, quality and energy. That's what we solve first. And often you'll see the pile of handwork start to shrink within a few days.
A good real-world example is the work we recently did for A&O Fonds Grafimediabranche.
Once the retyping is gone, something in the atmosphere changes. People no longer have to chase their own systems. The numbers add up, because they're only entered in one place. And the time that frees up goes to the customer, to the craft, to the things people came to work for in the first place. That's what we wish for you and your organisation, and that's exactly what we love to help with.
We'd love to look at your systems with you and where the retyping costs the most time. Together we can quickly see where the first connection pays off most, and how to make the handwork disappear!