How many systems run your company?
Take a moment to rate twelve areas. You will see at once how many tools are in play and at which handovers your data travels on by hand.
Start the checkThe system check shows where the greatest leverage lies.
No landscape grew in a single day. A CRM arrived for the sales team, a time recording tool because it became a duty, an invoicing program recommended by the tax adviser, and Excel on top of that for everything there never was a program for. Only when you write it all down side by side do you see the bill.
This check is exactly that writing down side by side, and it takes a few minutes. It sends nothing, asks for no address and does all its sums in your browser.
Your twelve areas
For each area: what runs it today? If you add the name of the program, the count becomes more accurate, because we can then see which areas share the same tool.
“Larger system” means a program that covers several of these areas at once. “Separate program” means a tool for this one area only. Whatever you do not need, mark as “We do not need this” and it drops out of the scoring.
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Customer data and contacts
Addresses, contacts, what was last discussed
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Quotations and sales
Writing quotations, following up, tracking deals
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Projects and orders
What has been ordered, who does what by when
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Tasks and collaboration
To-dos, boards, agreements within the team
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Working and project times
Who worked on what and for how long
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Leave and absences
Requests, approvals, remaining leave
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Invoicing
Outgoing invoices, part invoices, reminders
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Incoming invoices and receipts
Supplier invoices, approvals, travel expenses
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Handover to accounting
Tax adviser, financial accounting, month end close
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Customer enquiries and support
Taking in enquiries, assigning them, answering them
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Documents and file storage
Contracts, minutes, project papers
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Reporting and controlling
What a project cost, what is still open
How the counting works: every different program name counts once, no matter how many areas it turns up in. A separate program without a name counts on its own, while several areas marked “in a larger system” without a name count together as one. Excel, Word and email are not counted as a system, they are listed separately. A handover counts as a break point when the two sides sit in different systems or one side has no system at all.
Your map
The horizontal axis shows how well an area is supported today, the vertical axis how much it presses. The size of the dot shows how many break points the area sits at.
The top right holds what should come first: weakly supported and pressing. The dot ringed in green is your greatest leverage. The top left is the most honest corner of the map: whatever sits there already runs in a larger system and still hurts. In that case it is not down to the software, but to setup, upkeep or agreements. A hollow dot means that the area sits at none of the handovers we checked.
What this check is not
It is a map, not an expert report. It works solely with what you have entered and knows neither your industry nor your figures nor the quality of your existing interfaces. Two systems that talk to each other properly are better than one system nobody uses.
Nor is it a verdict on your work. Many break points do not mean that anything was done wrong, only that the landscape has grown along with the company. The one interesting question is which handovers you still operate by hand today and whether you want to carry on doing so.
And it is not a sales form. If the result above says that your systems hold together, then that is the result and not the opening of a conversation.
You have your map, but not the order?
The most common question after an exercise like this is not “which system?” but “where do we start?”. That can be talked through in half an hour, without anything having to come of it.
Go through the map together