How many hours a week go to manual admin, counted from your own numbers.

Most of the admin in a large operation gets done in pieces too small to notice, a few minutes at a time, by people whose job title says something else. Say an account manager at a wholesale distributor opens a customer before ringing the buyer. The first stretch goes on working out which order is still open and whether anyone heard back from the warehouse about last week's short delivery, and only then does the phone come out.

The time log files all of it under the customer call, which then looks like twenty minutes when the talking took twelve. So the first answer to how many hours a week go to manual admin is that the number is probably not written down anywhere, because the hours are spread thinly across every handling of every account.

Count the minutes spent looking

The arithmetic OCTYN uses runs on your own figures. Take the accounts, cases or customers that are live, times how often each one is handled in a cycle, times the minutes each handling spends finding where it was left, then divide by the weeks in that cycle.

Those defaults, on the page on what a system gives back, come to 96 hours over the four weeks, or 24 hours a week. They are research averages, labelled that way, for three people sharing 180 accounts, and the hours come from a McKinsey Global Institute finding from July 2012 that the average interaction worker spends nearly 20 percent of the workweek looking for internal information or tracking down the colleague who has it. Eight hours each, out of forty, is a fifth.

Yours will differ. Say the distributor has six regional offices that each look like the default, and the same sum gives 144 hours a week, before anybody has counted the warehouse or the credit desk.

What a system carries, and what stays with people

The second half of the page asks for a share, the part of those hours a system would carry, and leaves it as your estimate. It starts at half. What comes back is the looking, because one record per account that every step writes into means the open order and the warehouse's answer are on screen when the account manager opens the customer.

Whether this buyer gets credit again, or whether a short delivery deserves a call from somebody senior, stays with a person who knows the account, and the share you set should leave that work with your team. The hours that come back are meant to go there.

Beside the result, the page says what the estimate leaves out. There is no price in it, since that is given after a mapping call, fixed and in writing, and it skips the weeks before a system runs. The total cost of ownership entry covers what running one costs after that.

Sit with one person for a morning before trusting any of these figures, the page's included.