Information chaos and repetitive work: a hidden cost to your business and how to reduce it

A salesperson receives an enquiry from a regular customer and looks for the previous quotation. It is not in the mailbox; on the drive there is a file called “quote_v3_final_FINAL”. They ask a colleague whether it is the current version; the colleague does not remember, so they ask the sales director. After a quarter of an hour, the salesperson has an answer that should have taken half a minute.

Let us put numbers on it using a hypothetical company with 35 employees. Assume that each person loses 15 minutes four times a day searching for information or checking which version is current. That is 35 hours a day out of the 280 working hours of the whole team (35 × 8), or about 12.5%.

Research confirms the order of magnitude, although it is not new. In 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that knowledge workers spend nearly 20% of their week searching for information or for colleagues who can help. These figures pre-date the spread of Teams, so treat them as a signal, not a substitute for your own measurement.

Information chaos does not mean a lack of data. It means the data is everywhere: in emails, on drives, in spreadsheets and in people’s heads. So every task starts with working out what is true.

The other side of the same problem is tasks that someone does by hand day after day, although they could happen by themselves. The examples below are hypothetical, but many companies will recognise themselves in them.

A customer service employee answers the question “when will my order arrive?” 60 times a day. Each answer takes 2 minutes, so together that is 2 hours a day, or a quarter of a full-time job. The status information is in the system; the customer just has no access to it.

A salesperson prepares 15 quotations a month and starts each one from scratch, even though most of the content is repeated. At an hour and a half per quotation, that is about 22 hours a month – almost three working days that are missing from conversations with customers.

Until recently, the classic example was retyping invoices from PDFs into the accounting system. Since 2026, most invoices from Polish companies have arrived through KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System, as ready-made data. If your accounts team is still retyping them, that is a sign that your invoice workflow should be the first thing you review.

In a five-person company, chaos is barely visible. Everyone knows everything, and decisions are made around one table. The number of possible pairs of people who might need to communicate is only 10.

With 25 people, there are already 300 such pairs, and with 100 people, 4,950. Nobody knows everything, sales does not know what customer service has promised, and a newcomer learns the company from whichever colleague happens to have time. Information that used to be passed on over coffee now gets lost.

That is why chaos usually starts to hurt once the team no longer fits around one table, and with a few dozen people it becomes a serious brake. Solutions that worked in a small team – a shared folder, a spreadsheet, the boss’s memory – stop being enough, even though nobody decided to change them.

You do not need an audit to make an initial assessment. Check how many of the symptoms below you recognise in your company.

If you recognise three or more of them, putting your information in order should be on the plan for the coming months. If one or two, deal with them individually before they grow.

The cost of chaos is rarely visible in the management report, because it ends up under other headings. It shows up as a lost customer, a complaint or a low margin on a contract. Three hypothetical examples show what this looks like.

First: an enquiry from a web form lands in a shared inbox and waits a few hours, then spends two days going round departments. Meanwhile the customer receives a quotation from a competitor and the matter is closed.

Second: a regular customer changes their delivery address, but the change reaches only one of two systems. The delivery goes to the old address, and the customer starts looking for another supplier.

Third: a salesperson sends a quotation on last year’s price list because nobody updated the template. The customer accepts a contract priced at PLN 170,000 instead of PLN 200,000, and the company loses PLN 30,000 on a single deal. Each of these cases looks like a one-off slip, but over a year they add up to a sum that nobody sees in one place.

A single source of truth means that for each type of information there is one place that holds the authoritative version. Everything else is a copy or an archive. In a mid-sized company, it is usually enough to put in order the three areas shown in the table below.

The hardest part is not technical. You have to decide that the old places no longer count: the shared folder becomes read-only, and the customer spreadsheet disappears. Without that decision, the new tool simply becomes one more place where people look for data.

Each area also needs a person who is responsible for it. That person makes sure the data is up to date and decides who has access to it.

Only when the data is in one place does automation have something to work with. The quickest results usually come from tasks where the organised areas meet. The list below shows typical examples.

If you choose an AI assistant for customers (the first item on the list), remember the law. From 2 August 2026, an AI system that talks to people must tell them they are not talking to a human. Also plan a clear path for handing a case to an employee when the assistant does not know the answer.

The management board’s most common response is: “we don’t have time for this right now”. The paradox is that the company most weighed down by chaos has the least time to deal with it. So the argument should not be scare stories about competitors, but figures from your own company.

Choose two or three symptoms from the list above and measure them on a sample from the last month. How many enquiries waited more than a day for a reply? How many quotations went out on the old price list? How many hours a week does the team spend on questions about order status? We describe the method for measuring time in detail in a separate article.

Then start with one area, not all of them at once. Sales documents or customer information usually work best, because that is where chaos turns into money fastest. After a few weeks, compare the results with the baseline measurement, and only then move on.

A single source of truth will not fix a lack of decisions. If nobody in the company knows who is responsible for a customer or who approves discounts, no tool will settle it. Organisational decisions have to be made first, and only then recorded in the system.

Nor are new tools always needed. In a company of a dozen or so people, a tidy folder, one shared customer spreadsheet and a rule that agreements are recorded in one place are often enough. Technology makes sense when simple rules stop being enough because there are too many people and matters.

Finally, order needs maintaining. If, after a year, nobody is looking after the folder structure and the quality of data in the CRM, the chaos returns. So for each area, write down who is responsible for it and how often they check that the rules are being followed.