Fire The Committee: Why Your Premium Systems Need to Play as a Team

Harambee Stars beats FIFA All Stars 7-0! And not just any FIFA All Stars; we're talking about a dream team with Mbappé, Lamine, Messi, Salah, Jude, Vinícius - the most expensive collection of football talent ever assembled. How did our national team pull off this miracle? Simple. The All Stars weren't allowed to pass the ball directly to each other. Every pass needed approval, and ball boys were dispatched to deliver the ball. Sure, these were the most efficient ball boys in history - completing each pass in just one minute, with all approvals in place!

If that sounds absurd, welcome to how most Kenyan companies run their operations today. Your ERP system is Mbappé - lightning fast, incredibly expensive, best-in-class. Your accounting software is Messi - another premium superstar that cost you millions. Your inventory system? That's Salah - another costly champion. But just like our fictional All Stars, these superstar systems can't pass information directly to each other. Instead, they rely on spreadsheet "ball boys" to manually carry data between them.

We've become so used to this madness that we've invented metrics that shouldn't even exist - like "data transfer accuracy rate" and "manual entry completion time." It's like hiring a dedicated coach for the ball boys instead of letting the players actually play together! Some companies even brag about how their data entry team can transfer information between systems in "just" 24 hours - as if that's something to celebrate.

Want to know what's really crazy? Companies are spending hundreds of millions on these individual superstar systems, then watching them get outperformed by competitors running integrated solutions that cost a fraction of the price. Imagine paying Ksh 50M for an ERP system that needs a Ksh 20K spreadsheet to talk to your Ksh 30M accounting software. That's not a technology strategy - that's a very expensive way to lose the game.

Let's talk about what this circus is actually costing you. First, there's the obvious stuff - the salary of your "ball boys" (data entry team), the time spent in meetings discussing why the numbers don't match, and the small fortune you're spending on Excel training. But that's just the warm-up act. The real killer is time. In football, a one-minute delay for each pass means you'll never score. In business, when your inventory system needs 24 hours to tell your procurement system what's running low, you've already lost the game. Your competitor with integrated systems has already placed their order, while your procurement team is still waiting for yesterday's spreadsheet.

Then there's the errors. No matter how good your ball boys are, they're human. A mistyped number here, a copy-paste error there, and suddenly your financial reports look like they were generated by a random number generator. But hey, at least you have that 99.9% accuracy rate metric to make you feel better, right?

Here's the good news - you don't have to play like this. Modern integrated systems are like having a team that actually knows how to play together. No committees, no ball boys, no Excel gymnastics. Just smooth, real-time flow of information between all your business functions. "But we've invested so much in our star players!" I hear you say. True, but here's a thought - Manchester United once kept playing expensive stars who couldn't work together, while Leicester City won the Premier League with a team worth a fraction of the price. Why? Because Leicester played as a team.

The path forward isn't about buying more star players or training faster ball boys. It's about building a team that plays together, where information flows as smoothly as a Leicester City counter-attack. It's about systems that speak the same language, work towards the same goals, and don't need a committee to approve every pass.

Remember our Harambee Stars vs All Stars match? The Stars won because they played as a team, while the All Stars were stuck waiting for ball boys. In today's business world, you're either playing integrated or you're playing to lose.

Ready to fire the committee and bench the ball boys? Let's talk. Book a consultation and together we'll get your systems playing beautiful business.

Your move, Captain.