Tuesday, nine twelve in the morning
Marta has been copying data from a PDF into an Excel sheet for seventeen minutes. She's thirty-four, has a business administration degree, a master's in Logistics, and blue plastic-framed glasses she pushes up with the back of her hand every time she switches browser tabs. She does it without noticing. Switches tabs, pushes up her glasses, copies a number, pastes it, goes back to the PDF. She's been doing this every Tuesday and every Thursday for three years.
Nobody asked her to do it this way. It's just that when she arrived, this was how it was done.
Marta works at an industrial supply distributor in Murcia. Twenty-four employees. Two and a half million in revenue. The owner, Antonio, founded the company in 2003 and still personally reviews every delivery note before an order goes out. When you ask him why, he says because otherwise errors slip through. When you ask him how many errors he's caught in the last month, he stops to think. Three, he says. Maybe four.
Four errors in two hundred and forty delivery notes. A rate of 1.6%. To catch that 1.6%, Antonio spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day. Three hundred hours a year.
Nobody's done that math. Nobody ever does.
The invisibility problem
There's something that happens at small and medium-sized companies that doesn't happen at big ones. At big ones, someone measures. Someone puts a name to each process, assigns it a time, calculates its cost. At SMEs, processes don't have names. They're "what Marta does on Tuesdays" or "what Antonio reviews before lunch." They're habits. Routines. Things that have always been done this way.
I saw it the first time I walked into a company to analyze its workflows. The owner had called me because he felt his team couldn't keep up. He needed to hire, he said. I asked him to let me observe for two days. Just watch. At the end of the second day I handed him a report with a column he wasn't expecting: hours spent on tasks that don't require human judgment. The number was fifteen hours a week per person.
Fifteen hours. Almost two full workdays.
They weren't hours lost to social media or coffee breaks. They were hours of real work, people focused, doing things. Except those things could be done by a machine. Copying data from one place to another. Sending the same email with tiny variations. Checking that a number here matches a number there. Generating a PDF from a template. Moving a file from one folder to another.
When a manual task repeats every day for years, it stops being a task. It becomes part of the scenery. Like the hum of the air conditioning: it's there, it burns energy, but no one hears it.
60% of administrative time could be automated
According to a 2023 McKinsey study, 60% of time spent on activities with a heavy administrative component could be automated with technology that already exists. Not future technology. Not science-fiction AI. Tools that have been available for years. Automated workflows. System integrations. Simple rules: if this happens, do that.
But companies don't use them. Not because they don't want to, but because they don't know they need them. They don't see the problem. What they see is that they can't keep up, that they need more people, that the day doesn't have enough hours.
So they hire. And the new person learns the routine. And the routine perpetuates itself.
What happened when someone stopped to look
Back to Marta. Those seventeen minutes copying data from the PDF to the Excel became, once the process was automated, zero minutes. A script reads the PDF, extracts the relevant fields and dumps them into the sheet. It takes four seconds. Marta no longer pushes up her glasses every time she switches tabs because she no longer switches tabs. Now she spends that time calling suppliers to negotiate prices. Something that requires judgment, experience, intelligence. Something a machine can't do.
Antonio no longer reviews two hundred and forty delivery notes a month. An automatic validation system flags him only when there's a discrepancy. He gets three or four alerts a month. The same errors as before, but found in milliseconds. The three hundred hours a year have become fifteen.
Nobody had to be fired. Nobody had to be hired. You just had to look.
The hours are still there
Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five hours a week per person, buried in tasks nobody questions. Money burning without smoke. Talent spent copying and pasting.
If you've ever felt that your team works hard but moves slowly, maybe you don't need more people. Maybe you need someone to sit down, look, and count the hours nobody counts.
Does your team work hard but move slowly?
Maybe you don't need more people. Maybe you need someone to count the hours nobody counts. No commitment, no endless slide decks. Just a conversation.
Let's talk