Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.138 2023.04.01 Takahashi Minoru

Tips for ordering a system effectively

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


When introducing systems or solutions,
the following slogans are often used:
・Eliminate overburden, unevenness, and waste
・Visualization and transparency *Conducting numerical evaluations and making them public
・Ensuring everyone can perform tasks to the same standard


I can certainly understand
I can understand this to a certain extent.
Since a system running on a computer is a collection of 0s and 1s,
the system itself is essentially a pre-established set of rules,
and I know from experience
from my own experience.


However, if you take that idealism and simply translate it into rules to implement on the ground,
employees and customers will inevitably become confused.
Some workplaces ran smoothly precisely because they were ambiguous, inefficient, irrational, dependent on individuals, or simply continued doing things the way they always had—
and that’s why it worked well in the past—
and sales teams that have been successful precisely because of that.


We are system professionals, but
we become even more cautious when a client presents us with the aforementioned slogan.


If things are currently running on Excel, it might be better to keep them that way.
but are there really no potential drawbacks to replacing it with a system?
Drawing on both our past successes and, unfortunately, our failures,
and spend our days desperately searching for and proposing “realistic solutions.”


The search for a “realistic solution”
is synonymous with exploring
essentially means determining how much we can tolerate these three factors.
(In some companies, there is even a debate over “how much employee misconduct to tolerate.”)
Demanding a complete elimination increases the risk of implementation failure,
but leaving things completely unchecked risks the company going under in the near future.


What level of balance is sustainable for your company in the long term?
Since specific cases vary by company, I cannot address them here,
if your company is currently considering implementing such a solution,
I believe it is worth pausing and reconsidering the matter.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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