Your staff enter the same information in three different places. Nobody really knows why.

Systems arrive one at a time. Each solved a real problem on the day it was bought, by a different person, in a different year, for a different reason.

None were bought to talk to each other, and owning the joins has never been anybody's job. So the joins became people.

That isn't a failure of planning; it's what planning looks like when it happens six separate times over eight years.

Pick the thing your staff record most often. Ask three of them - the people typing, not their manager - to list every place it ends up.

The three lists won't match, which tells you it isn't really a process. And at least one destination will be read by nobody, and won't have been for a year.

Forty staff, three duplicated entries a week, ten minutes each, is around 900 hours a year.

The time is the part you can count, and it is the smaller part. Duplicate entry is also the dullest work in the building, it falls to your administrators, and it is one of the reasons the good ones leave.

The larger cost is that three copies of the same fact drift apart. Once they disagree there is no way to settle which one is right without going back to the person who typed it, and every report built on top of them carries that doubt forward.

That is the point where it stops being a question of efficiency. A funder, a governor or an inspector asks you for a number, and the honest answer is that it depends which system you ask.