The Buyer With a Notebook in His Desk Drawer

Three months after a new business system went live, we found a buyer keeping his real numbers in a notebook in his desk drawer. The system wasn’t broken. Nobody had asked him what he actually needed before they built it.

We’ve watched this same pattern play out in plants ranging from $50 million to multi-billion-dollar operations. A big, expensive rollout goes live with data that looked clean going in. Ninety days later, the spreadsheets are back, planners are padding buffers nobody trusts, and leadership is convinced the whole project failed.

Most of the time, the software is fine. What broke is that the people who touch the system every single day never got a seat at the table. Hand someone a change they had no part in shaping, and they’ll have a workaround built by Friday. Everyone loves change right up until it happens to them.

When an implementation goes sideways, we don’t start with the system. We walk the floor. The operators already know exactly where the system doesn’t match reality — and they’ve usually already built the workaround to prove it. The answer is almost always already in the building.

Author Profile

Lee Stout