Insights
Notes from the engine room of the Mittelstand.
No listicle filler. Specific processes, specific industries, specific failures — and what they cost.
The Annual Count Isn't a Stock Correction — It's an Invoice for the Errors
Once a year you count, book the difference and everyone is relieved. But the difference isn't a result, it's a bill — for twelve months during which your business planned against stock figures that weren't true.
Modelling the Target Process — Without Romanticising the Current One
A target process doesn't emerge from drawing the current one and crossing out the bad parts. It emerges from three decisions you have to make explicitly — otherwise habit makes them for you.
Why We Work at a Fixed Price — and What That Changes for You
A day rate rewards attendance. A fixed price rewards a result. The distinction sounds like commercial detail, but it changes the work itself — and it shifts a risk that in the mid-market has almost always sat with the client.
Complaints Are Your Best Process Diagnostic — and the Only One You've Already Paid For
Complaints get handled, documented and filed. Treated as a dataset, those same records show precisely where your process systematically produces errors — at no cost, because the data collection happened long ago.
Lead Time: Why Your Estimate Is Always Too Low
Ask five people how long an order takes and you'll get five similar numbers — all of them too low. The reason isn't optimism, it's a structural blind spot. And it decides your delivery dates.
Media Breaks: What Retyping That PDF Really Costs
An order arrives as a PDF and someone types it into the ERP. It takes four minutes and looks harmless. The time is the smaller item — the larger one is the error rate, and you pay for that somewhere else entirely.
What Survives After the Consultant Leaves — and Why Usually Nothing Does
Six months on, the new process runs like the old one again. That is rarely the fault of the concept and almost never the fault of the workforce. It happens because three things were never settled during the project — none of which appear in any presentation.
Master Data: The Quiet Error Source That Looks Like a System Problem
When the ERP produces wrong answers, everyone debates the ERP. In most cases it is calculating correctly — just from data nobody has checked in years. How to recognise it, and why replacing the system takes the problem with it.
Changeover Time: The Hours That Appear in No Costing
Your costing carries a changeover time. It usually dates from when the machine was new and has been carried forward ever since. What actually happens on the shop floor regularly differs from it by a factor of two — with consequences for batch sizes, delivery dates and prices.
Goods Receipt Isn't a Side Show — It's Your Most Expensive Bottleneck
No business willingly invests in goods receipt. It's treated as an unloading point, not a process. Which is precisely why delays start there and arrive two departments later looking like a production problem — where they get solved expensively and wrongly.
What a process audit really finds (with a real example)
Almost every business holds a firm conviction about where its bottleneck sits. And almost every time, it sits somewhere else. An anonymised example from the shop floor — and why the suspected cause is rarely the real one.
Excel as a shadow ERP: how to spot it and what it costs
At some point there was a spreadsheet. Today it is the real system your business actually runs on — holding a version of the truth that no longer even appears in the expensive ERP beside it. Here is how to recognise it and what the silent price really is.
Why order confirmation in wholesale takes four days
A customer orders on Monday and hears nothing back until Thursday. Not because anyone is slacking, but because three handoffs sit between the inbox, the ERP, and the warehouse. Here is what that costs — and how to put a stop to it.