No operator sat down and designed the set of systems their venue runs on. It accumulated. The till came with a recommendation from a mate in 2019. The bookings platform arrived when the till's own bookings module turned out to be dreadful. Payroll came from the accountant. The delivery tablets just turned up one day and never left.
Each decision was reasonable. Nobody made a bad call. And yet the result is four systems that have never been introduced to each other, with a person quietly employed as the connective tissue between them.
The morning ritual
Walk into most multi-site offices at nine in the morning and you will find it: somebody with two screens open, moving numbers from one system into another by hand. Bookings into the till. Takings into the spreadsheet. Hours into payroll. It is nobody's favourite part of the job and it is nobody's fault, but at two sites it is an hour a day and at six sites it is somebody's entire role.
You do not have to rip it all out
The good news is that the answer is almost never "replace everything". Most of the time it is keep what works, replace the one thing that does not, and build the bridge in between. The bridges are cheaper than they used to be, and they are almost always cheaper than the person currently doing the job of one.
Start with an honest list: every system, what it talks to, and every place a human moves data between two of them. The list is usually shorter than feared and worse than expected.
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