The Fires

Chapter 02

The Fires

Your operations team's reality. Not vague inefficiency. Specific fires the business normalized until leadership started carrying them by hand.

Approval theater

Carlos approves ~40 POs per week. Most are rubber-stamped because he lacks the context and time to review them properly.

Tribal knowledge risk

Monthly close, WMS exports, and escalation routing all depend on specific people. If they disappear, the company slows or stops.

Context fragmentation

Six systems produce six versions of reality. Teams spend mornings reconstructing what happened before they can decide what to do.

Leadership oxygen burned

The COO starts the day figuring out what happened overnight. The CEO carries routing, approvals, and exceptions that should be infrastructure.

How 180 People Actually Spend Their Time

31%
24%
18%
17%
10%

Your team was hired to make decisions and drive strategy. They spend 55% of their time on work a system could do.

31% Manual data work
24% Meetings + coordination
18% Strategic work
17% Approvals + escalations
10% Actual decisions

60% of your team's time goes to work that systems can handle. 17% requires human judgment. 10% is the strategic work you hired these people to do.

Key Insight: 55% of operations time goes to manual coordination and data gathering. That is not a process problem. It is an architecture problem. The company is using human attention as middleware.

SOP vs. Reality

Order-to-CashSOP: 8 steps → Reality: 14 steps, 3 handoffs
The SOP
Order received
Credit check
Inventory allocated
Pick and pack
Ship
Invoice generated
Payment received
Cash applied
8 steps, linear
The Reality
14
Steps
3
Handoffs
8-day invoicing delay
Cycle time
~120 orders/week
Volume

14-step flow with 3 manual exceptions and 2 Excel handoffs. Orders enter through HubSpot but must be manually transferred to SAP. Inventory checks require a WMS export to Excel. Average 8-day delay between order completion and invoice generation.

The Gap
Orders manually copied from HubSpot to SAP. No integration. Average 15 minutes per order, 120 orders/week.
Inventory availability checked via WMS CSV export to Excel. By the time the data is in Excel, stock may have changed.
Invoice generation delayed an average of 8 days after order completion. Estimated €180K/year in delayed cash collection.
Sophie sends 30+ manual status update emails per day to 3 departments. No automated notifications.
Payment mismatches investigated manually in Excel. No root cause tracking across incidents.
Inventory ReconciliationSOP: 4 steps → Reality: 9 steps, 3 handoffs
The SOP
Pull WMS report
Pull SAP report
Compare and reconcile
Adjust discrepancies
4 steps, linear
The Reality
9
Steps
3
Handoffs
6-8 hours
Cycle time
Daily
Volume

Should take 2 hours with 2 systems. Takes 6-8 hours because WMS and SAP do not sync. Marc exports a CSV every morning, compares manually in Excel, flags discrepancies, then adjusts both systems separately.

The Gap
WMS-to-SAP sync does not exist. Marc exports CSV daily using a script only he understands.
Discrepancies require physical count verification. One warehouse supervisor plus Marc, simultaneously, for 2-3 hours.
SAP and WMS adjusted separately after reconciliation. No guarantee both systems reflect the same correction.
Marc's export script is on his laptop. Not documented. Not backed up. If Marc is out, reconciliation stops.
ProcurementSOP: 5 steps → Reality: 11 steps, 4 handoffs
The SOP
Request submitted
Vendor quote
PO created
PO approved
Goods received
5 steps, linear
The Reality
11
Steps
4
Handoffs
2.3-day CEO delay
Cycle time
~40 POs/week
Volume

Purchase requests arrive by email, get tracked in Tom's personal Excel, and route through SAP. Any PO over €5K requires CEO approval via email. Carlos approves ~40 per week with an average 2.3-day delay. Most are rubber-stamped.

The Gap
CEO reviews ~40 POs/week. Most under €10K. Admits he rubber-stamps most because he lacks time to review properly.
No visibility into budget vs. actual spend until month-end. Tom tracks in a personal Excel that no one else can access.
Goods receipt in WMS has no connection to SAP PO. Invoice matching is entirely manual.
Vendor quotes compared against budget in Excel. No historical pricing data accessible in any system.
Customer EscalationSOP: 3 steps → Reality: 8 steps, 0 documented rules handoffs
The SOP
Complaint received
Routed to team
Resolved and closed
3 steps, linear
The Reality
8
Steps
0 documented rules
Handoffs
~45 min per escalation
Cycle time
25-30/week
Volume

Complaints arrive through HubSpot, email, and phone. Céline triages every single one from memory. Routing is based on her personal knowledge of who handles what. Follow-ups tracked in her personal spreadsheet. Resolution sometimes logged in HubSpot.

The Gap
Escalation routing depends entirely on Céline's memory. No rules, no decision tree, no system logic.
Each escalation requires ~45 minutes: checking order status in SAP, shipping in WMS, history in HubSpot. All done manually.
Follow-up tracking lives in Céline's personal spreadsheet. When she is on leave, escalations stall or get lost.
Resolution logged in HubSpot inconsistently. No data on resolution time, root cause patterns, or repeat issues.
Weekly ReportingSOP: 2 steps → Reality: 7 steps, 4 systems handoffs
The SOP
Collect data
Send report
2 steps, linear
The Reality
7
Steps
4 systems
Handoffs
4-5 hours
Cycle time
Weekly
Volume

The Monday ops report requires pulling data from HubSpot (sales), SAP (finance), WMS (inventory CSV), and HubSpot tickets (CS). All copied into an Excel template. Charts rebuilt manually every week. Report emailed to leadership Monday afternoon.

The Gap
4 separate data sources pulled manually every Monday morning. Each pull takes 20-40 minutes.
Excel template breaks regularly when data format changes. Last broken for 2 weeks before anyone noticed.
Report delivered Monday afternoon. By then, the week's decisions are already being made without data.
No historical trending. Each week's report is built from scratch. Previous weeks' data not automatically retained.
Key Insight: Every process we mapped had 40-75% more steps in practice than documented. The gap is not negligence. It is accumulated workarounds for systems that do not talk to each other.

Fire Register

AreaFindingHours
FinanceMonthly close: Laura + David manually reconcile 400+ entries across SAP and Excel22h
OperationsOrder status updates sent manually by Sophie to 3 teams via email14h
LogisticsWMS has no SAP sync. Marc exports CSV daily11h
LogisticsInventory check requires WMS + SAP + physical count simultaneously12h
Customer SuccessEscalation routing done by Céline from memory. No rules.9h
FinancePOs over €5K require CEO approval. Carlos signs ~40/week8h
OperationsMonday ops report assembled manually from 4 systems7h
AllNo single source of truth. Each team maintains their own versionongoing
83h/week across 8 identified friction points83h
Key Insight: 83 hours per week. That is 2 full-time employees worth of time, every week, spent on work that should not exist. And it has been normalized.

Risk Register

Single Point of FailureCritical
Laura Girard, COO
Order-to-cash has no documented process. Laura carries it in her head. 14 years of institutional knowledge not captured anywhere.
Single Point of FailureCritical
David Ribeiro, Finance
The SAP-Excel reconciliation macro was built by David 6 years ago. No one else can run it. If he is out, the monthly close stops.
Single Point of FailureCritical
Marc Thierry, Warehouse
The daily WMS export depends on a custom script Marc wrote. Not documented. Not backed up.
Compliance GapHigh
No audit trail
Decisions made in Slack and email are not captured in any system. No traceability for quality or regulatory review.
Revenue LeakageHigh
Late invoicing
Average 8-day delay between order completion and invoice generation. Estimated €180K/year in delayed cash collection.
Data IntegrityMedium
No master data governance
Same customer exists under different names across HubSpot and SAP. No deduplication.
Process GapHigh
No close status visibility
No consolidated view of month-end close progress. David checks status across SAP and Excel files manually. Issues surface only when deadlines are missed.
System FragmentationHigh
6 systems, 3 disconnected
SAP, WMS, HubSpot, Excel, Google Workspace, and Slack. Only HubSpot and Google Workspace are properly integrated. The rest depend on manual bridges.
Next Chapter
The Counterattack