No case studies.
Just cases.

The process before digitalisation

17 steps. Now just 4.

A Swiss SME with 20 sites wanted to digitise its accounts. It was already ‘digital’: PDFs were being sent back and forth. There were 17 manual steps between receiving an invoice and posting it to the accounts.

The obvious approach would have been to automate these 17 steps. A tool could have done that. It would have dealt with 17 unnecessary steps very quickly.

I didn’t digitise a single one. First, I understood the process. Then I simplified it. Then I automated it.

What remained were four steps. Nobody had ever needed the other thirteen. They had simply never caught anyone's eye.

Leadership

Two departments. One budget.
Suddenly on the same page.

A Swiss company with its own IT department: development and support. The head of development effectively ran the entire IT department. He set the direction — and judged the department that had to deal with the consequences of his mistakes.

Development delivered. No handover, no documentation. Support only found out about new features when the first user rang.

Those who could leave, did. In the end, even the support team leader left. Then I arrived.

I could have organised a workshop on collaboration. Both are helpful when people don’t understand one another. Here, they understood each other perfectly well.

Instead, I changed the rules.

A budget for both departments. A ticketing system that makes it clear where a bug comes from. Service level agreements for both sides — including the development team. From then on, a bug cost the development team their own budget.

People don't work against each other because they are bad. Nor because they are incompetent. They do it because the structure rewards them for it. Change the structure.

The courage to call it off

Two ERP implementations.
I cancelled one of them.

Two companies, similar budgets. With the first, we spent three months analysing processes before anyone configured the system. It’s still working today.

With the second, they wanted to move quickly. The system was up and running after six months. Meanwhile, people carried on working in Excel.

No tool in the world replaces a process that doesn't exist.

An honest ‘no’ costs me a client but saves you many times that amount.

Simple solutions

Nights turned into two hours.

Every year, the same thick folder, right at the last minute. Nights of manual work to ensure every team gets their sign.

When I redesigned the website, I added a backend to it. One tick per team. One click generates all the signs as PDFs.

The solution wasn’t complicated. It’s just that nobody had asked before what was actually going on.

Architecture rather than hardware

The server on the sports field.

Timekeeping at sporting events. The server was carried to every competition venue — to swimming pools, to sports halls. No piece of kit can withstand that for long.

The solution wasn’t a more expensive machine. It was portable workstations with mirrored hard drives and a hypervisor. A template for every sport.

It used to take hours to set up. Now: load the template, get started.

Standby

A reserve that isn’t really a reserve.

Spare laptops used to sit in a cupboard. When you needed them, it took two hours just to install the updates.

The images now run as virtual machines on a hypervisor, kept up to date round the clock. Plug in the hard drive, load the image.

Minutes instead of hours. A reserve that becomes obsolete in the cupboard is no reserve at all.

Digital sovereignty

They wanted their IT back.
Nobody knew how anymore.

Outsourcing took place in stages. First, their own servers were housed in a data centre. Then operations moved abroad. When the next hardware upgrade came, the servers were physically relocated. In the end, everything was in the cloud.

Every single step was justifiable. Taken together, they resulted in a company that no longer knew how its own IT worked.

Taking stock. A realistic assessment. Built up step by step.

The same package never comes back. The servers stay away — instead, we need people who understand how to manage what’s running in external hands.

You don't get back what you gave away. You build something new.

Corporate experience

Colleagues travelled here
to observe.

Many years at the European headquarters of one of the world’s largest companies. At some point, colleagues from other countries came to see how we did things.

There was no secret. Clear processes, clear responsibilities — and an IT department that didn’t just issue tickets, but understood the business.

The same approach works in SMEs. In fact, it’s even more urgently needed there.