The technology company that ran on paper

The client was a technical hardware business. Technology was in the name, in the catalogue and in every customer conversation. Behind the counter, the operation ran on paper. Orders moved through the business as physical documents, passed from hand to hand, and now and then one slipped out of a folder and disappeared. The first anyone knew of it was when a customer rang to chase the order.

Everyone knew this had to change, and the team had been asking for a proper system for years. But the paper process held more than paper. It ran on the memory of the long-serving staff who had built it over decades and never written it down. New hires learned by watching, and many found it too hard and left. The people who understood the system best were the people it depended on, and they knew it.

So when the business decided to implement an ERP with AI capability, it was doing something necessary. It was also asking its most experienced people to give up mastery and become beginners again, and most of them were not confident on a computer. They had wanted the new system. Living through the switch was harder.

By the time we arrived, the rollout was struggling. The company was implementing the ERP and criticising it at the same time, sometimes in the same meeting. Leaders voiced their frustration with the new system openly, and every complaint from the top gave the doubters permission to push back. Factions formed. The people most needed to carry the change were the ones undermining it, often without realising it.

The usual instinct at that point is to push harder: more training, more configuration, more pressure. We stepped back instead, because the business needed a diagnosis more than momentum. The step back showed that the requirement had never been defined. The business believed it was missing software. It was missing documented processes. Its ways of working existed only in people’s heads, and software laid over undocumented processes simply automates the confusion.

Before returning to the rollout, we used our ICAM and ICAP frameworks to take the leadership team through the questions it had skipped. Together we defined and documented the processes the software needed to support, aligned the executive team on where they were heading, and built a real sense of urgency in place of grudging compliance.

The people side mattered as much. We made it safe for staff to learn. Everyone got one-on-one time, and those who were taking longer had some of their workload lifted, so the strain of learning didn’t tip into overload. We worked with leaders to set the pace person by person, enough pressure to keep people moving without pushing them under.

We also asked the executive team for discipline through the low point of the change. Their commitment was simple to state and hard to keep: back the change in public, take frustrations to the leadership table and keep them off the shop floor, and answer sceptics with results. Once leaders stopped criticising the system, the factions lost their cover, and the conversation moved from whether the change would survive to how to make it work.

The rollout succeeded. Lost orders dropped to zero. Response times improved, customers were happier, and so was the office. The investment that had looked like being written off paid for itself. The people who had resisted came around more slowly, but with steady leadership and colleagues visibly better off, they got there. A long-running problem resolved along the way too: with processes documented and the system guiding the work, new hires got up to speed quickly, and the turnover that came from learning by watching fell away.

Technology adoption usually fails on leadership and people. The resistance is often about what the change takes from people: the mastery, status and sense of being needed that the old way gave them. Understand those losses first, document the processes before you buy the software, and keep leadership steady through the hardest part.

If your organisation is adopting new technology and finding the people side harder than the implementation, talk to us about our change management work. Understanding what your people stand to lose, and leading them through it, is the work we do.