Most inefficient processes don't look broken.
They work.
The invoice eventually gets sent. The customer receives an answer. The report gets prepared. The order reaches the right person. The information ends up in the system.
The problem is everything that happens in between.
An employee copies information from one place to another. Someone sends an email asking for an update. A manager has to approve something that rarely gets rejected. A spreadsheet needs to be updated manually. Someone has to remember what happens next.
Individually, these steps may only take a few minutes.
Repeated every day, across several employees, they can become a significant hidden cost for an SME.
Here are five signs that your business processes may be worth looking at more closely.
The same information is entered more than once
This is one of the easiest inefficiencies to recognize.
A customer submits information through a form.
Someone copies it into an Excel file.
Later, another employee enters it into the CRM.
The finance team eventually enters part of the same information into another system.
Nothing is technically broken.
But the business is repeatedly paying people to move the same information around.
This creates two costs.
The first is obvious: time.
If a five-minute task happens 20 times per week, that's more than 80 hours per year.
Multiply that across several repetitive processes and the numbers can become meaningful surprisingly quickly.
The second cost is error.
Every time information is manually copied, there is another opportunity for something to be entered incorrectly, forgotten or become outdated.
What to look for
Ask employees:
“Where do you regularly copy information from one place to another?”
The answers often reveal some of the easiest process improvements available to an SME.
But don't immediately automate everything you find.
First ask whether the duplicated step needs to exist at all.
Eliminate before you automate.
Too much knowledge lives in people's heads
Every SME has people who simply know how things work.
They know which supplier to contact.
They know which spreadsheet needs updating.
They know what happens when a particular customer makes a request.
They know that after Step A, someone needs to remember to tell Maria about Step B.
This informal knowledge can work extremely well when a company is small.
Until that person is sick.
Or on holiday.
Or leaves.
Or the company grows and a new employee needs to understand the process.
A useful test is:
If the person responsible for this disappeared for two weeks tomorrow, could someone else continue the process?
If the answer is no, the business may have a process dependency.
The solution doesn't need to be a 50-page procedure manual.
Often, a simple checklist, shared workflow, clearly assigned responsibility or short internal guide is enough.
The objective is not to document everything.
It's to make sure important processes don't depend entirely on one person's memory.
Simple tasks generate too many emails and messages
Consider a relatively simple internal request.
- Someone sends an email.
- Another person asks for more information.
- The first person replies.
- Someone forwards it to a manager.
- The manager approves it.
- Someone sends a message asking whether it has been approved.
- The original person follows up three days later.
- Eventually, the task gets completed.
Again, the process works.
But the amount of communication required to make it work is a warning sign.
Email, WhatsApp, Teams and other communication tools are useful.
They become inefficient when they are being used as workflow management systems.
A simple question to ask
Look at recurring internal conversations and ask:
“Are we communicating because communication is necessary, or because the process doesn't tell people what happens next?”
Sometimes the solution is automation.
Sometimes it's a shared tool.
But sometimes all that is required is a clearer process with defined responsibilities and fewer approval steps.
Nobody is completely sure who owns the next step
A process can involve several people without having a clear owner.
This creates familiar questions:
“Did you send that?”
“I thought they were doing it.”
“Are we waiting for the client?”
“Has this been approved?”
“Who is supposed to follow up?”
The issue isn't necessarily that employees are disorganized.
The process may simply not make responsibility clear.
This becomes particularly problematic when work moves between departments or functions.
A customer enquiry might move from marketing to sales to operations to finance.
A project might involve management, an employee, a supplier and an external provider.
If ownership isn't explicit at each stage, work tends to slow down at the handover points.
A useful process test
For every important step, someone should be able to answer:
Who owns this?
What triggers the next step?
How do we know it has been completed?
If those answers aren't obvious, improving the process may create more value than adding another tool.
Growth creates more administration than value
This is one of the most important warning signs for a growing SME.
Imagine sales increase by 30%.
That's good.
But what happens behind the scenes?
If 30% more customers means:
30% more manual data entry;
30% more spreadsheets;
30% more emails;
30% more invoices to prepare manually;
30% more internal coordination; and
30% more management involvement;
then growth is also scaling the company's inefficiencies.
At some point, the solution becomes:
“We need another person.”
Sometimes that's correct.
But before hiring, it's worth asking:
Are we adding someone because there is genuinely more valuable work to do, or because our current processes don't scale?
If an administrative process can handle 100 customers but starts falling apart at 150, the business may have reached the point where process improvement becomes strategically important.
Calculate the cost before changing anything
Finding an inefficient process doesn't automatically mean you should fix it.
Some inefficiencies simply aren't worth worrying about.
Suppose an administrative task takes an employee 10 minutes per month.
You could spend CHF 5,000 building an automated solution for it.
Technically, you've improved the process.
Economically, you've probably made it worse.
Before changing something, estimate:
how frequently the task occurs;
how much employee or management time it consumes;
the approximate cost of that time;
how many errors or delays it creates;
whether the problem will become larger as the company grows; and
what solving it would actually be worth.
This prevents process improvement from becoming an objective in itself.
The goal isn't to make every process perfect.
The goal is to improve the processes where doing so creates meaningful value.
Simplify first. Standardize second. Automate third.
When businesses identify inefficient processes, technology is often the first solution that comes to mind.
- New software.
- An integration.
- An automated workflow.
- AI.
Sometimes that's exactly what is needed.
But automating an inefficient process can simply make a bad process run faster.
A better sequence is:
1. Simplify
Does every step actually need to exist?
Could an approval be removed?
Could information be collected once instead of three times?
Could two steps become one?
2. Standardize
Once unnecessary complexity has been removed, make the process predictable.
Who does what?
What information is required?
When does the next step begin?
What does “completed” mean?
3. Automate
Only then ask which repetitive, predictable processes are actually worth automating and where technology could handle the work more efficiently.
This makes automation both easier and cheaper because you're automating a cleaner process.
Start with one process, not the whole company
Another common mistake is trying to redesign everything at once.
For most SMEs, there is little reason to launch a massive “operational transformation” because a few workflows aren't working well.
Start with one.
Preferably, choose a process that is:
repeated frequently;
clearly inefficient;
relatively easy to understand;
causing measurable frustration, cost or delay; and
simple enough to improve without disrupting the entire company.
Map how it works today.
Identify unnecessary steps.
Create a simpler version.
Test it.
See what employees actually do with it.
Then improve it further if necessary.
A small process improvement that saves five employees 30 minutes every week can be more valuable than an ambitious project that never gets implemented.
Your processes should support the business, not slow it down
Inefficient processes rarely appear overnight.
They develop gradually.
A spreadsheet is created to solve an immediate problem. Another step gets added when a new employee joins. An approval is introduced after one mistake. A new system arrives but the old one never disappears.
Five years later, everyone accepts the process because:
“That's how we do it.”
For an SME, periodically questioning these routines can reveal surprisingly simple opportunities to save time and reduce unnecessary work.
Look for the signals:
- Information being entered repeatedly.
- Knowledge depending on individual employees.
- Simple tasks generating excessive communication.
- Unclear ownership between steps.
- Administration increasing as quickly as the business grows.
Then resist the temptation to immediately buy a solution.
Understand the problem.
Simplify what already exists.
Test a better version.
And only then decide whether technology, automation or external expertise would make it better.
Is a process taking more time than it should?
Sometimes the difficult part isn't knowing that something is inefficient. It's understanding why and deciding whether it's actually worth changing.
Tell MAST what's happening. We'll look at the problem with you and help identify a practical way forward.
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