Every company is different, but what holds back its growth looks very similar. Industry, size and city change; the pattern repeats. When a company asks us for help, we almost always find one of these three stones in its backpack. Often, all three at once. And as on the mountain, every extra kilo is felt with every step.
Stone 1: a company made of islands
Sales has its spreadsheet. The warehouse has another. Purchasing uses a little system someone built years ago. Finance reconciles everything at the end of the month, by hand. Each area knows different things and nobody has the full picture.
Imagine an expedition where each climber carries their own map, drawn their own way, and they only communicate by radio when they remember to. Nobody knows for sure where the rest are or which route to take. They wouldn't get far. And yet that's how many companies operate — and they're profitable, too.
If your company is already profitable operating in islands, imagine how much it could gain with a single map for everyone.
The risk isn't only about efficiency. When strategic information lives on each employee's computer, all it takes is for someone to leave and they take customers, history and knowledge with them.
Stone 2: climbing with yesterday's forecast
Try it. Ask in your company: what's the profitability of this product line? And of this customer, this branch, this project? In the vast majority of mid-sized companies we know, the answer takes weeks, if it comes at all.
Worse still: the information that does exist is usually prepared to pay taxes, not to make decisions. It arrives late, it arrives aggregated and it arrives when there's nothing left to correct.
Leading like that is like planning a climb with last week's weather forecast. By the time you finally find out the storm was coming, you're already in the middle of it: either you keep climbing blind, or you move so slowly that others reach the summit first. The expeditions that make it to the top check the weather and their position at all times, and adjust the route on the fly. Companies that grow steadily do the same: they know their profitability by customer, product, brand and location as it happens. That's where their strategy lies: knowing what to go after, where and how to stand out.
Stone 3: entering the same thing three times
An order comes in through sales. Someone types it again to invoice it. The warehouse enters it once more to fill it. Accounting records it again. And if there's an outside accountant, they get a spreadsheet to re-enter everything one more time.
Every re-entry costs time and opens the door to errors. Added up, they represent a huge part of your team's workday. When they're eliminated, the efficiency gains are usually very noticeable.
There's an important nuance. In a mid-sized company, eliminating re-entry rarely means cutting people: the team is almost always overloaded. What happens is that people are finally freed to do what they were hired for: sell, serve, analyze, improve.
What the ideal looks like: the order is entered only once. From there it becomes an invoice, an inventory movement and an accounting entry without anyone typing it again. And if the director opens the income statement at that moment, that sale is already there.
Quick self-assessment
- How many spreadsheets are critical to running your company? Who owns each one?
- How long does it take you to know the real margin of your most important product or customer?
- How many times is the same sale typed from when the order comes in until it's booked?
- If the person who “has the file” quit tomorrow, what would you lose?
Why you have to drop them together
The three stones feed each other. Islands generate re-entry; re-entry delays information; late information forces people to create more “control” files. Attacking just one with a patch (an isolated system for sales, another for inventory) usually just moves the problem: now you have to pay for integrations, syncing and developers so the systems talk to each other.
The KLIMMER view
Our approach follows the natural order of a good expedition: first understand how information flows today and where it breaks (processes), then give everyone a single map where that information lives integrated (ERP) and, on top of clean, connected data, add artificial intelligence. Integrating isn't buying software: it's getting your whole company to climb on the same rope.
