It’s great news! Things are going well, and increasingly you need to do more with what you have. Whether you’re innovating in your problem space, or whether demand has increased and you’re scaling your org to keep up, this exciting step change also comes with growing pains.

The most common symptom: tools that have been working up until now are becoming bottlenecks.

Unfortunately, creaky systems will hamper your ability to grow, slow down the team, and negatively impact customer experience. So let’s talk about how to spot when this is happening to you, as well as some strategies on how to deal with it.

The Warning Signs

First, how do you know when your operations have outgrown your tools?

1. People are manually entering data - a lot

If your teams are copying and pasting data between systems, or entering data in multiple places, this is a strong sign that your tools aren’t working for you.

Example:

You have an HR system and a payroll spreadsheet. Each month, someone has to check the HR system for compensation updates and add them to the payroll sheet, so everyone gets paid properly. Another team member then copies this data into the finance system to make the payments. Sometimes someone gets paid the wrong amount, and an emergency payment has to be raised.

Risk: critical. The risk of human error grows every time data has to be entered and re-entered, especially in business critical processes like payroll.

2. A spreadsheet is your “source of truth”

Has the quantity of spreadsheets in your company recently grown exponentially? Are there multiple versions of the same spreadsheet being downloaded and edited? Not to mention smart teammates using complex VBA scripts and formulas to make those spreadsheets work harder.

Example:

Your inventory management system doesn't fully integrate with your finance ERP, so every week a team member has to download the inventory report, run a script to format the data, and re-upload it into Oracle. Now various team members have copies of sensitive pricing data on their laptop hard drives. Last week, the script went wrong and materially impacted the month-end financial reporting.

Risk: critical. Spreadsheets are insecure and repeated downloads of the same data creates huge vulnerabilities, especially if the data is sensitive.

3. Teams are creating their own workarounds

Operators are resourceful, and maybe you’ve noticed that teams have begun creating their own unofficial processes to improve operational efficiency?

Example:

You have a procurement system but a few times you’ve missed customer orders, so now for every order the sales team also pings a Slack message to the relevant procurement team, just to make sure they’re aware of it. Now order information is in multiple places, and you’ve accidentally placed a large order twice, leaving you wondering where you’ll store the excess stock.

Risk: high/critical. Using multiple tools for a single workflow causes confusion, leading to costly mistakes. If teams are creating workarounds for compliance steps, the risk can be critical.

Why does it matter?

As well as the examples above, outgrowing your tools introduces other risks, like:

• Operational inefficiencies - too much time wasted on manual tasks and resource drain on teams

• Opportunity cost - when you’re growing, you want to make the most of every potential customer and opportunity, so inadequate tools become a huge bottleneck

• Poor customer experience - slower response and service times, inconsistent communication, and issues with quality control

• Frustrated team members - overly complicated training followed by lots of context switching between tools is likely to result in low job satisfaction. Even the most motivated employees are turned off by wasting time on tooling issues.

When simple tools stop being simple

The journey from simple to complex often sneaks up on fast-growing operations teams.

Take one example, a rapidly growing company that recently hit €1 billion in revenue. What began as a straightforward operations stack - Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot and Airtable - gradually became a web of manual processes. Their team found themselves constantly switching between systems, downloading attachments from one tool just to upload them to another, and maintaining Excel spreadsheets to help them reconcile information. Even basic tasks like processing a new order required team members to copy data between multiple systems, with no single source of truth for critical business information.

The complexity compounds when external partners enter the picture. Another company doing in-person installations illustrates this perfectly - their contractors each use different CRM systems, leading to a convoluted process where photos taken on-site get uploaded to the contractor's system, downloaded by their office staff, emailed to the company, and then manually uploaded into a central system.

What should be a simple task of documenting installation progress becomes a multi-step process vulnerable to delays and errors. Their operations team found themselves managing multiple communication channels - email, WhatsApp, shared folders - just to keep track of basic project updates. Meanwhile, their project management tool couldn't provide basic visibility into how projects were progressing or alert teams to stalled processes, forcing managers to manually search through records to identify bottlenecks.

What you can do about it

1. Evaluate where you are now

First, why not take an audit of your existing tools and map them against your processes? It’ll take a little time investment, but you’ll quickly start to see where the pain points and duplications are coming in. Involve team members closest to the operation to get a clear insight into where the biggest frustrations lie.

2. Plan for growth

Now you know your biggest risk areas, you can start looking at what tooling will future-proof your operations. This is likely to include decisions about replacing existing solutions vs building or developing your own custom ones. It’s also important to consider integration requirements, for tools you already have that you love but aren’t working closely enough with the rest of your systems.

How Keel can help

Timing is everything when it comes to making decisions about systems. Luckily, Keel allows you to solve one problem at a time, rather than ramping up to some “big bang” implementation. We believe in the importance of balancing disruption and necessity, so you can choose where to start, whether that’s your most critical issue or the most self-contained.

Keel is an API-first solution, so we’re all about creating great integrations that empower you to keep using the tools you love (even if you’ve had trouble integrating them with other software in the past). Keel’s also secure - validated through SOC2 accreditation - and prioritises giving team members the right level of access, so you can carefully define who sees what.

We work closely with our customers to help you reach the solution that’s right for you. For a free, no-obligation chat about your current challenges, book a demo now.