Business digitalisation in Galicia: 4 phases that don't disrupt operations

Most digitalisation failures in Galician SMEs aren’t down to picking the wrong software. They’re down to trying to digitalise everything at once, or starting in the wrong place. The typical result: 6 months of operational chaos, a team resisting change, and a project that gets abandoned or reduced to the most basic module.

Business digitalisation in Galicia done properly is a sequence. It’s not a big bang. This is the sequence that works for SMEs with 8-50 people.

Phase 0 · Before you start: an honest picture

Almost nobody does this, and it’s the most important step. Before touching any technology:

• List every process that eats up >2h/week of someone’s time. Not the “important” ones — the ones that eat up time.
• For each one, note: who does it, how long it takes, what tool they use, what typical error it produces, what happens if it’s delayed.
• Ask each key employee to answer privately: “what would make your life easier tomorrow?”

The output is a map of processes with quantified pain. Without this map, you’re buying technology blind.

Shortcut if you can’t do this alone: an external diagnostic with numbers delivers this in 2-3 weeks.

Phase 1 · Organise and diagnose before deciding (month 1-2)

Before switching ERPs or building new automations, three steps that stop you investing in the wrong direction:

• Audit of current tools. Your ERP or accounting software probably has functionality you’re not using. Configuring it properly can relieve part of the pain in the short term. If, after the tune-up, the ERP still doesn’t cover your real workflows, the audit is already telling you it structurally won’t grow with you and the path is to migrate.
• Standardising names and categories. If everyone calls the same customer/product something different across systems, no software will fix that for you. You need to tidy this up first — and this work isn’t wasted: it cleans the data that later gets migrated to the next system.
• Real backups + a restore procedure. Without this, any digitalisation is building on sand. A Galician distribution SME lost three months of data to a disk failure plus a backup that “had been broken for months and nobody noticed.”

By the end of phase 1 you should have a clear diagnosis: either your current ERP is going to stay with you for several more years (and the following phases are built on top of it as targeted patches), or it’s time to plan a migration to a modern ERP that natively integrates the automations you need.

Phase 2 · Tackle the most expensive bottleneck (month 2-4)

Using the phase 0 map, identify the process that consumes the most hours or generates the most errors each month. Not the most “modern” one, nor the “easiest” one.

Typical examples in Galician SMEs and what solves them:

Bottleneck	Usual solution	Approximate timeframe
Manual order transcription (WhatsApp/phone/email)	Automatic receiver that structures the order	4-6 weeks
Managing receipts and expenses for mobile staff	Mobile app with OCR + automatic categorisation	5-7 weeks
Paper delivery notes, late invoicing	Digitalised delivery notes with mobile signature	4-6 weeks
Delivery routes planned “by eye”	Planner with cost/km optimisation	6-8 weeks
Stock that “nobody knows where it is”	Lightweight WMS with locations and guided picking	8-12 weeks

Prioritise ONE of these per phase. Tackling two at once doubles the team’s resistance without doubling the benefit.

A concrete case: a company with a warehouse in Pontevedra chose to tackle order transcription first (which was eating up four hours a day between two people) instead of the “big WMS project” they’d been considering for two years. Results visible within a few months, and the success of phase 2 bought the internal permission for phase 3 (the real WMS).

Phase 3 · Integrate what already works (month 4-8)

With 2-3 targeted tools already in use and proven, it’s time to connect them:

• ERP ↔ online store: so web orders reach the ERP without manual typing.
• ERP ↔ e-invoicing: mandatory since 2025 for B2B; if you left it until the last moment, now’s the time.
• Order receiver ↔ ERP: closing the loop from phase 2.
• ERP ↔ Google Sheets for management: automatic reports without accounting having to build them every Monday.

Integration rarely fails because of technology. It fails because product names/codes don’t match between systems. That’s why phase 1 (standardisation) is what makes phase 3 work.

Phase 4 · Optimise with your own data (month 8-12)

With all the pieces in place and generating clean data, the optimisation layers come in:

• Management dashboard with real, live KPIs.
• Automatic alerts (low stock, a customer who hasn’t ordered in 60 days, an invoice due tomorrow).
• Basic demand forecasting based on your own history.
• AI-driven automations on accumulated data (categorisation, suggestions, anomaly detection).

This is where the compound effect kicks in. Phase 4 capabilities don’t work on data scattered across patches — they need a single, live data model shared by all modules. A useful demand forecast requires order history, seasonality, stock, routes, returns — all cross-referenced. If each of those data points lives in a different system connected by APIs, the result is inconsistent.

That’s why SMEs that reach phase 4 successfully have almost always migrated beforehand to an ERP with natively integrated modules. Not because phase 4 literally requires it, but because without clean, coherent data, phase 4 returns garbage. SMEs that try to start at phase 4 do so with dirty data, and the results are garbage.

Mistakes specific to the Galician market

“I’m going with the Kit Digital digitalisation agent.” The voucher itself is useful, but most agents’ execution is generic. If the agent doesn’t ask about your real operations before proposing anything, it’s a template website that won’t move the needle. The voucher gets spent but nothing gets digitalised.

“I’ll get round to this when things quiet down in summer.” It never quiets down. There’s always an excuse. SMEs that genuinely digitalise accept that the first two months are operationally slower, and treat it as an investment of time.

“My team doesn’t know anything about technology.” Doesn’t matter. What matters is how the tool is designed. A delivery SME whose team had never used smartphones professionally managed to adopt, within two weeks, a mobile app designed with three buttons and tactile feedback. The technology has to adapt to the team, not the other way round.

Checkpoints so you don’t lose your way

• Month 2: have I saved time on the phase 1 processes? If not, the diagnosis was wrong.
• Month 4: is the first phase 2 project in production and used by the team without resistance? If not, the scope was too large.
• Month 8: do the phase 3 integrations measurably reduce manual work? If not, there’s probably a dirty-data problem to solve before continuing.
• Month 12: can you see real KPIs in 3 clicks without asking anyone for anything?

If every checkpoint is green, you’re on track.

Next steps

To decide what type of software you need for your phase 2, read the map of business software by category. If the bottleneck is logistics, the 3 automation cases in warehouse-based SMEs give you concrete examples.

At Rowan Tech we support you from phase 0 through to phase 4, with a firm rule: nothing gets proposed in phase 2 until the phase 0 diagnosis is finished. No quantified pain, no project. And when the diagnosis shows that your current ERP won’t grow with you any more, we propose migrating to our ERP for SMEs with logistics operations — with phase 2, 3 and 4 capabilities natively integrated from day one. Let’s talk.