Sports businessDigitalisation · Sport and leisure
A sports business that worked, but on paper. Management lived in binders and spreadsheets, invoices were prepared by hand, the counter till had a life of its own, and whatever happened online, when it happened, didn't reach anywhere.
Working like this, every piece of data exists in several copies, and nobody knows which one is right. The same name has to be written three times, the evening's takings have to be copied over by hand, and to know how things are going you have to wait for someone to put the pieces together.
The brief was to digitalise the whole business: put a management system at the centre and bring everything else into it.
Four steps one after the other, because without the management system at the centre the rest would have stayed disconnected, just like before.
That's where we started, because without a single set of records everything else would have been just another disconnected piece. Contacts, transactions and documents in one place, with the paper data brought in rather than starting again from scratch.
Invoices stopped being documents written by hand and copied out: they come out of the system, with the data already in them and the status of every item visible without opening a binder.
The counter till was connected to the management system. Whatever is taken goes where it should on its own, without the evening step of someone copying the figures over: that was exactly where, on paper, mistakes used to creep in by themselves.
On top of the digital base came the website and the shop, connected to the management system too. An online order enters the system just like a payment at the counter, without anyone typing it in.
In the end the business had a single set of records into which invoices, till takings, website contacts and shop orders arrive on their own, where before they had to be reconciled by hand.
Staying on paper has a cost, even if it never shows up on an invoice: the hours spent putting data back together, the transcription errors and not knowing how things are going until someone works it out.
We chose to end it, and there was only one reason: this business and the sports association we describe alongside it are run by the same people. There are rules for running an online shop and managing an organisation that aren't written down anywhere, but that you pay for later if you skip them, and on those we couldn't reach an agreement. We'd rather walk away from an engagement than carry it on in a direction we don't share. When we stopped, the digitalisation was complete and running.
The same areas of work we bring to every company: this engagement needed 4 of them, together.
The thinking behind this case, explained in full on the blog (in Italian).
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