Yesterday I wrote that when you are about to automate your logistics business, you should be prepared to spend five times as much as you initially think. That is, multiply the price of the winning proposal by five.
I can hear you protesting: “I don’t have five times as much. It’s hard to find the budget to do it once. If IT is that hard, we’ll stay on pen-and-paper for ever.”
I don’t want to scare you out of doing things. On the contrary: I want to make you less scared to proceed. Building something and then throwing it away doesn’t mean it didn’t pay off. It did pay off, because it gave you valuable experience in order to do it again and better. No business could exist or improve if its people weren’t undertaking such risks.
So, you have a small budget. What can you do about it?
There are solutions to this. You could try increasing the budget. You could try building something simpler that costs five times less. You could even go ahead and build the full thing. Maybe it will succeed the first time. Maybe it will work barely enough to save you enough money to do it again next year. Maybe you’ll just lose that amount and see what you’ll do next.
The important thing isn’t to find the budget. The important thing is to get into the mentality that it isn’t necessarily going to work or be useful just because you’re building it.
If it works, so much the better.