Most digital transformation advice is written for organisations with a programme office, a change function and a budget line that renews annually. If you run a 40-person company, none of that exists. You have a handful of people who are already fully booked, a system everyone works around, and money that had to be argued for.
That is a different problem, and it has a different answer. This is the 90 days we would run.
Days 1–15: find where the time actually goes
Not a maturity assessment. Pick the three processes your people complain about and follow one order, one invoice and one hire from start to finish, writing down every handoff, re-keying and wait.
You are looking for one number: how much elapsed time is spent waiting versus working. In the companies we see it is usually somewhere between 60% and 85% waiting — and waiting is free to fix compared with buying software.
Do this with a notebook. Instrumentation comes later, if at all.
Days 16–30: pick one process and one owner
One. Not a portfolio. The candidate should meet three tests: it happens often enough to measure inside a quarter, someone can be made accountable for it, and improving it does not require anyone else's permission.
That last test eliminates most attractive-looking candidates, and it is the one that protects your quarter.
What should an SME digitalise first?
Whatever is currently held together by one person's memory or one shared spreadsheet. That is where the risk sits and where the payback is fastest, because you are replacing an unmanaged dependency rather than optimising something that already works.
Order entry, quotation, and time-to-invoice are the usual answers in Swiss SMEs — which is most of the economy: the Federal Statistical Office counts SMEs as over 99% of Swiss companies and roughly two thirds of employment. Analytics, dashboards and AI are almost never the right first move — they describe problems you already know you have.
Days 31–60: change the process before buying anything
The most common expensive mistake is buying software to automate a process nobody has simplified. You then pay to encode the mess, and every future change costs money.
Take the process you picked. Remove the steps that exist only because of how the old system worked. Reduce approvals to the minimum that anyone would actually defend. Then see what is left — frequently it no longer needs the software you were about to buy.
Where it does, you now have a specification instead of a wish list, which is also the difference between a two-week vendor evaluation and a six-month one. We wrote about running that properly in ERP selection for the Swiss mid-market.
Days 61–90: ship it and measure against the notebook
Deploy to the one process, with the one owner, and compare against the baseline you wrote by hand in week two. Not against a projection — against the notebook.
If the number did not move, stop and find out why before starting the second process. A first improvement that cannot be demonstrated makes the second one politically harder, and in a small company political capital is the scarcest resource you have.
How much should a small company budget?
Less than most proposals assume, if you sequence it this way. The first 90 days are mostly your own people's time plus a small amount of outside help to structure it. Software spend belongs in the second quarter, once the process is simplified and the requirement is real.
Any proposal that starts with a platform and a licence count before anyone has followed an order end to end is selling you a solution to an unexamined problem.
What usually goes wrong
| Failure | What it looks like | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Too many fronts | Five workstreams, none finished | One process, one quarter |
| No named owner | Everyone consulted, nobody accountable | One person who can say no |
| Tool before process | The mess, now in software | Simplify first, buy second |
| No baseline | "It feels faster" | The notebook from week two |
| Consultant-dependent | Nothing works when they leave | Handover with a date |
After the first quarter
The second process is easier, because you now have a method, a demonstrated result and an owner who has done it once. That compounding is the actual transformation — not a platform, and not a roadmap deck.
If you want the business case written so it can be judged rather than admired, the structure is in how to measure ROI on a digital transformation, and our digital transformation practice runs engagements in exactly these quarter-long increments.
Related reading
- How to measure ROI on a digital transformation before you fund it
- ERP selection for the Swiss mid-market
- What should a Swiss company actually pay for consulting?
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