Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.139 2023.05.01 Takahashi Minoru

The natural human urge to fill empty spaces

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


When procuring a business management system for your company,
if you outsource development to an IT vendor or other external party rather than having employees build it in-house
there are several tips for successfully integrating the resulting system into your daily operations.
Please use these as a reference for promoting adoption and ensuring the system becomes an established part of your operations.


Tip 1: Start by trying it out in Excel
If you try to immediately implement a system for tasks that have traditionally been managed using analog methods—such as handwritten records or the intuition of experienced staff—
you’re likely to hit a wall.
Start by mapping your work onto an Excel spreadsheet
and test it internally to see if you can evaluate it as numerical data
within your company.


There’s no need to write macros.
If you do use any, they should be simple worksheet functions.


If this transition to Excel goes well, it will help clarify requirements,
it will also make negotiations with the system vendor easier.


If converting to Excel proves difficult,
it is reasonable to assume
.


Tip #2: The smaller the system, the better it works
No matter how ideal your vision for the system may be,
trying to build it all at once will likely lead to failure.


There is almost always a gap between the ideal and reality for each function.
Even if each individual gap is small,
the cumulative gap across the entire system becomes significant.


Start by building a system with a single function or two to three functions,
and then build the next feature once operations have stabilized.
Although this approach increases the total time and cost, it is a safe strategy.


Tip 3: If you get too caught up in the specifications, you’ll run into trouble a few years down the line.
Just like your core business operations, a system is a series of conditional branches.
"Do this in this situation," "Do that in that situation"—
and compiling them
and the result of compiling them
.


If you refine the system specifications, you can implement detailed business rules as functions,
it is often welcomed at the time of implementation,
business rules are bound to change eventually.
To make it easier to reconfigure functions, it is advisable not to over-engineer the specifications,
will likely contribute to long-term stable operation.


*If system specifications are kept too simple,
　　it can lead to a situation where "work must be adapted to the system,"
　　which is not particularly beneficial in itself,
　　but based on my experience, it’s rare for clients to request such a system, so I won’t go into detail here.


That's all, Thank you for reading.

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