Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.9 2011.03.01 Takahashi Minoru

The smaller the system, the greater the chance of success

Thank you for your interest and continued support.
This is Takahashi from the Marketing Plan Research Laboratory.


"If we're going to go to the trouble of implementing a system, we want to do this and that,"
, don’t you?
We believe we have a deep understanding
we believe we understand them very well.


"It costs less per unit to buy 100 items at once than to buy 10 items at a time."
This concept of volume discounts (a common business practice) also applies to system development.
The more features you build at once,
the unit cost per feature will certainly be lower.
That is a correct understanding.


However, in our system development,
we often keep the number of features built at one time to a minimum,
and we understand from experience that this approach makes it easier to ensure the system’s successful operation.


The cost of a system does not increase
but rather increases exponentially—like a snowball effect—
rather than in direct proportion to the number of features it possesses.


While this is a rough estimate based on the system’s purpose and specifics,
if we set the "difficulty of a system with 20 functions" to 20,
the difficulty of a system with 40 functions would be approximately 50 to 80.


Furthermore, even if you hold a briefing session to introduce a system with a large number of features,
employees will be stunned by the thickness of the materials and lose focus,
stare in disbelief at the sheer number of buttons on the menu,
and even after a month of training, they still won’t be able to enter a single form—
—this is the terrifying reality of system development.


People tend to avoid staircases with too many steps,
and if the risers are too high, they become nothing short of a wall.
I recommend starting small as the first step in system implementation.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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