We Bought the Tools, So Why Didn’t Our Operations Improve?

Tech only amplifies what you have designed; it does not design for you.

In Indian epics, there’s a character named Karna, one of the greatest warriors, with celestial weapons gifted by the gods. But when the moment came, he couldn’t summon them. Why? Because he hadn’t done the inner work, he had forgotten the invocation.

Operations, at scale, work the same way. You can have the best tools, the slickest dashboards, and AI auto-tagging, but if you haven’t done the work of design, of clarity, handoffs, escalation, and roles, the tools won’t show up for you. They’ll sit there, like Karna’s weapons—dormant.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen Indian SMEs undergo a wave of digitisation:

• ERPs for stock and finance

• CRMs for leads and follow-up

• Notion and ClickUp for task flows

These tools promise scale, and they do unlock it if you’ve earned the right to use them. But in most teams we meet, here’s what’s really happening:

• Tasks are logged but not owned

• Dashboards show lags, but no one acts.

• Automations exist but require manual nudges.

What looks like tech maturity is often just process confusion in high definition.

A Story from the Showroom Floor

One of our clients, an automotive parts chain, adopted a cloud POS and real-time inventory tracker across three cities. On paper, it was a game-changer, but two months in, the same issues returned:

• Wrong orders dispatched

• No clarity on who fixes the mismatch

• Senior team jumping in to firefight

The culprit?

Everyone was using the system, but no one had redesigned how decisions flowed.

The tool was fast, and the ops logic was not. And similar to Karna in battle, the moment the crisis hit, the system didn’t show up.

Why This Happens So Often?

Here’s the silent mistake: Most teams deploy tools to solve for scale. But tools don’t solve; they amplify. If your logic is broken, the tech will amplify the chaos. If your roles are fuzzy, the CRM will just make confusion trackable. And the scariest part? Good tech masks bad design beautifully, making things look professional, even as they’re dysfunctional.

A Simple Test: Karna vs. Krishna

Ask yourself:

• When a mistake happens, does your team know who rethinks the system?

• Does your dashboard spark questions, or is it just reporting?

• Can a new joiner understand the logic, not just the tool?

If the answer to any of these is “hmm… not really,” your tools are leading you, and that’s not what scaling needs. Scale needs clarity before complexity, rhythm before reporting, and most of all, design before deployment.

So, what should you do instead?

Here’s the 3-level approach we recommend:

1. Design the flow without the tool first.

Use whiteboards, post-its, and tables in Word. If the logic isn’t clear on paper, it won’t survive automation

2. Assign roles before you assign permissions.

Every field, tag, and status must map to a person. If ownership isn’t visible, tools will only create noise.

3. Run one process offline.

Before launching your shiny dashboard, simulate the entire process without it. Let the team feel what “good ops” feels like, not just what good UI looks like.

Founders often ask, "Should we wait till we grow more to invest in tech?" That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “Have we earned the tech yet?” Because tools don’t fix what you haven’t designed. They just show you what you’ve ignored in colour-coded charts.

(The author is a co-founder at PPS Consulting. He is a business transformation consultant. He could be reached at rahul@ppsconsulting.biz.)