[demoo]

Got a friend who is overseeing manager of about 5-6 Aldi supermarkets in my area.

At the end of every day, every supermarket calls him with the daily results. He writes them down, takes a picture and sends that to his manager at the national HQ.

He just uses his phone and the occasional meeting to do business, there is no computer/laptop or system on his end.

Aldi is always portrayed as brutally efficient. So I was wondering what to read into this. Best I was able to come up with is that it's cheaper for them not to have an overseeing system to manage this.

[tonyedgecombe]

I've seen plenty of corporates automate systems that don't warrant automation. Somehow development gains a momentum which nobody is able to stop. SAP sites seemed to be the worst for this.

[ahartmetz]

Yes. When the org my sister worked at was trying and failing to automate vacation tracking, I was curious and asked some questions. As a software guy, I saw the frequent rules updates, hard to codify rules, increased effort to fix mistakes, smallish headcount, and expensive consultants... and said: This probably just does not make sense to automate.