I like to ask companies a simple question: how many hours per week do your employees spend searching for information that already exists?
Not creating something. Not solving a problem. But purely searching. For the right drawing. The latest revision of a work order. The email address of the right contact person at a supplier. The appointment that was made with a customer last week.
Most people estimate this at fifteen minutes per day. When I probe further, we quickly arrive at an hour. Sometimes more.
The calculation
Let's calculate conservatively. Say: five employees spend an average of 45 minutes per day searching for information that is available somewhere in the company — but not easily findable.
5 employees × 45 minutes × 220 working days = 825 hours per year
At an average hourly rate of €45 (including employer costs) that's over €37,000 per year. On searching. Not on producing, not on helping customers, not on improving.
And we haven't even talked about the errors that arise because someone used the wrong version of a drawing. Or the quote that went out late because the specifications couldn't be found quickly enough. Or the order that got stuck because nobody knew the material had already arrived.
Recognizable situations from the workplace
The work planner with three folders open
He knows exactly which customer has had this type of assignment before. He also knows that those drawings are somewhere — in a folder on the server, or maybe in an email from a year and a half ago. The searching takes him 40 minutes. The processing 10.
The planner who searches through three systems
To know the status of a running order, she logs into the ERP, checks the Excel planning and asks the workshop manager. Three sources for one answer. Every morning again.
The purchaser who knows it by heart
He knows the delivery times of regular suppliers by heart. That's efficient — until he's away for a week. Then production stops because nobody else knows where that information is.
What automation concretely changes here
None of these situations is unsolvable. They're also not the result of bad employees or bad management. They're the result of systems that don't talk to each other, information that isn't centrally available, and processes that were never designed for the amount of data that now flows through them.
With a well-configured AI environment on your own infrastructure you can:
- Make all your documents searchable via a simple search query in plain language
- Combine status information from multiple systems into one overview
- Automatically answer frequently asked internal questions based on your own documentation
- Capture knowledge that currently exists in heads and make it available to the entire team
It's not about replacing people. It's about taking away the work that frustrates them and keeps them from the work that truly has value.
Where to begin?
The first step is always an honest conversation about where in your company the most time is lost on this kind of manual work. That doesn't need to be a big research project — an hour with the right questions already provides a clear picture.
After that, we'll look together at what the most logical first step is: small, concrete, and with quickly visible results.
Curious what an hour of searching costs your company per year — and what you can do about it? Schedule a no-obligation introduction.