You work in a company and you notice every day things that you could do better - or the company has a management system that talks about continuous improvement
Highly motivated, you go to work and begin to capture problems or potential for improvement. Things are going smoothly, and more and more topics are coming at you. The next step is clear - in order not to lose track, you begin to summarize all the cases in an Excel document and follow up
Soon the management becomes aware of the work, is enthusiastic and demands regular progress reports. So once a month the Excel is evaluated and permanently you come across spelling errors, wrong or missing inputs and already you donated 1-2 days a month to set up the reports. Furthermore, you notice that some topics are stuck because the responsible persons have other (more important) things to do than to follow up measures or the measures are simply lost over topics in their daily work
And there, too, the solution is obvious: a database is needed, with an automatic reporting function, automatic reminders to problem solvers, selection fields instead of free-text fields for data entry, a small wokflow for the 4-eyes principle would not be too bad … so you start looking around on the Internet, Google for “improvement management”, “problem solving” or “deviation management” and indeed - there are various solutions on the market that you can easily buy
So you install demo versions of this software, you ask for advises by the top dogs on the market, about what the tools can do for you … and then you realize very quickly, that while there are tools that would be suitable for your needs - these tools are typically only a small part of a very large quality management software package; but you do not want to or do not need most of the package. The consequence is that you have to spend a lot of money on software that you really do not want to have and on top of that you have to invest a huge amount of maintenance, as the required function is of course linked to various other functions within the software suite that are not needed by you and therefore you need to enter a lot of unnecessary data to get his tiny little piece of the desired software running
Yes - I too went through this Valley of Tears wondering why there is not a simple and easy solution to my problem
But instead of biting into the sour apple and buying a completely oversized tool, I’ve started to program a small but fine tool exactly for my needs. Of course, this tool has also grown and become more complex over the years, but all of this work has never lost sight of two basic themes: Simplicity and Ease of Use