What we ask before recommending anything

1. Walk me through what happens when goods arrive. Who is there, and what do they write down?
2. Who closes the day, and what do they compare against what?
3. What happens when the owner is away for a week?
4. Where does the same information get written down twice?
5. What do you not find out until month end that you wish you knew on the day?
6. When something goes wrong with an order, who notices first, and how?
7. Which of your people would have to change how they work for this to succeed?
8. What did you try before, and why did it stop?
9. If nothing changed, would the business still be fine in two years?

Question three finds single points of failure, which are almost always a person rather than a system. Question four finds where duplicate entry is quietly consuming hours nobody counts.

Question seven is the one that predicts success or failure more reliably than anything else, and the one businesses least like answering. If the honest answer is nobody, then either the change is smaller than it appears or the business has not thought it through.

Question eight matters because most businesses have tried something before. What went wrong then will go wrong again unless it is named.

If a business would be fine in two years without changing anything, then it probably should not change anything, and saying so is more useful than selling it something.

That answer costs a sale and saves a customer from an implementation they had no pressing reason to attempt. It is also the answer that gets remembered when there is a real reason.