Your company already has the data.
Put it to work.

I have led two SAP implementations. One of them was among the first done at a national level in Mexico, for a construction group of sixteen companies, and it finished on time and on budget. Time and cost depend far less on the software than on how similar the processes already are across the companies involved. What stretches these projects is discovering halfway through that every company does the same thing differently, and only then starting to negotiate it.

Yes, and I have done it. The implementation at a Baja California supermarket and wholesale distribution chain had already failed twice with outside consulting firms when I came in. The third one landed with the in house technology team that was already there, without replacing a single person: what got reorganized was the work. Before restarting you need to know why it failed, because it almost always fails over business decisions left pending, and almost never over the software.

It means hiring the judgment of a technology director for a few hours a month instead of the full time position. It is worth it once a company has systems, vendors selling to it, and technology decisions worth millions, and lacks someone on its own side to judge what it is being sold. The job is translating between the executive team and the technical one, reviewing quotes and architectures, and saying what is worth building and what is worth leaving alone.

It depends on how closely your operation resembles the rest of your industry. Buying one of the big platforms runs into the millions, plus a year of work just to reach the base version, and renting costs tens of thousands a year and never quite becomes yours. Building your own earns its keep when the thing that sets you apart in the market is exactly what no off the shelf system does. It can be done in phases, each one delivering something usable before the next begins.

Before building anything, I sort each piece into four: what a person does, what rule-based automation solves, what calls for machine learning, and what calls for generative artificial intelligence. Anything that touches money goes into deterministic, auditable code, meaning it can be reviewed line by line and returns the same result every time. Generative AI is reserved for what has no structure, such as reading a truck odometer from a photo. And the hard rule: the system flags, and a person draws the conclusion.

Almost everything that travels today by email, by WhatsApp and by spreadsheet between one system and another. The data typed in twice, the report someone assembles by hand every Monday, the bank file reconciled against the system, the alert that something ran out of range. That gets connected on top of what you already own, so the operation keeps running while it is built, and the money comes back before anyone has to argue about replacing the system.

The first half hour is free: you tell me how you work and I tell you where I think your problem is, and if I am the wrong person for it, I say so right there and point you to who is. From there, the review of your operation takes two weeks and costs 35,000 MXN plus tax, credited back in full against the first month if you decide to have me build it. Longer projects run on a monthly retainer, with the scope agreed before we start.

One question answers it, and most people answer without stopping to think: if twice the work showed up tomorrow, where would it jam first. That is the bottleneck, and it usually turns out to be different from the symptom you had in mind. If the answer is a person staying late, a file somebody builds by hand, or a permit reviewed one by one, there is already something to start with. What you do need is an operation that already runs and has enough volume for the processes to get in its way.

A technology and artificial intelligence consultant based in Mexicali, Baja California, with 28 years in the field. I was Director of Information Technology at Grupo Hermosillo for fifteen years, from 2005 to 2020, and then ran the technology and later the whole company at Opulence Group in Dubai. Today I work with a small team on AI applied to operations, process automation, fractional technology leadership and SAP consulting.

Yes. I live in Mexicali and also work in Tijuana, across the rest of Mexico, and with US companies operating on both sides of the border. I hold two passports and two native languages, Spanish and English, so meetings and documents run in whichever one is needed. Much of the work happens remotely, and the interviews for the operations review happen at your plant or your office.