TL:DR
How to get everyone to perform like your top 20%.
We Have Spent Decades Optimizing People
We spend millions of dollars and countless hours trying to improve how people perform. We hire. We onboard. We train. We create procedures. We establish approval chains. We document best practices. We build performance metrics. We invest in systems designed to help teams execute more effectively. The objective behind all of this effort is remarkably consistent across industries. Businesses want better decisions, faster execution, stronger profitability, and outcomes that can be repeated and scaled.
Yet there is a question that surprisingly few organizations ever ask.
Are employees actually making decisions from the same information?
That question matters because most operational success is ultimately the result of thousands of small decisions made every day. Which supplier should we use? How should we price this opportunity? What lead time should we quote? Which customer deserves attention first? Which inventory position represents risk? Leaders often assume that if employees are trained, experienced, and operating within the same systems, those decisions will naturally converge toward similar conclusions. In reality, that assumption is often wrong.
Many businesses believe they are creating consistency through process. What they're actually creating is consistency around how work moves through the organization. The harder challenge is creating consistency around how decisions are made. Those are not the same thing. One governs execution. The other governs outcomes.
The Five-Question Test
Consider a simple exercise.
Walk through your organization and ask five employees the same questions.
- What pricing strategy should we use for this item?
- What have we sold this part for previously?
- Which customers purchase this part most often?
- What lead time should we quote?
- Which suppliers perform best for this component?
The answers themselves are not the point. The path used to arrive at those answers is the point.
If five employees arrive at roughly the same conclusion, the organization has likely achieved something valuable. If five employees arrive at five materially different conclusions, the organization has learned something equally important. The exercise is not measuring intelligence, competence, or experience. It is measuring how consistently organizational knowledge is being accessed and applied.
Most of us expect alignment because everyone works for the same company and has access to the same systems. Yet one employee reviews historical transactions. Another references reports. A third relies on memory. A fourth searches spreadsheets. A fifth checks emails or previous conversations. Each approach may be reasonable. Each employee may be acting in good faith. The problem is that they are often assembling answers from different pieces of information and different interpretations of reality.
The result is that employees may be solving the same problem while operating from entirely different foundations of knowledge.
The Hidden Cost of Decision Variability
Most operational problems are easy to identify. Delays are visible. Errors are visible. Bottlenecks are visible. Decision variability is far more dangerous because it often hides in plain sight.
Pricing begins to drift between teams. Margins become inconsistent. Customers receive different answers depending on who responds. Supplier selection varies from buyer to buyer. Lead times become harder to predict. Forecasts become less reliable. None of these issues appear catastrophic in isolation. Together, however, they create an organization where outcomes become increasingly difficult to repeat.
What makes this challenge particularly deceptive is that businesses often respond by treating the symptoms rather than the cause. More approvals are added. More reviews are introduced. More reports are generated. More documentation is required. More training is conducted. These actions can improve governance and accountability, but they rarely address the underlying issue if the information required to make decisions remains fragmented across systems, spreadsheets, reports, transactions, emails, and individual experience.
The problem isn't necessarily that our people are making bad decisions.
The problem is that they're making decisions from different starting points.
Many companies I've talked to eventually normalize this reality. They stop asking why answers differ and begin assuming that different answers are simply part of doing business. In many cases, the greatest operational inefficiencies are not caused by poor decisions. They are caused by inconsistent decisions. I mean everyone can't be the same, can they?
When Experience Becomes Infrastructure
This challenge becomes increasingly significant as companies grow. In many businesses, consistency is maintained not by systems but by experienced employees who know where information resides, which historical events matter, and how previous decisions were made. They understand supplier performance without needing to search for it. They remember pricing outcomes from similar situations. They know which customers buy certain products and which operational patterns deserve attention.
That expertise is incredibly valuable. In fact, many organizations operate successfully because experienced employees continuously bridge gaps between disconnected systems, fragmented information, and incomplete visibility.
Experience doesn't lack value. The problem is that experience often becomes infrastructure.
Many companies believe they possess institutional knowledge when what they actually possess is institutional memory. Critical context lives inside people rather than inside the organization itself. The business functions effectively because experienced employees know how to connect information that the company cannot easily connect on its own.
Eventually every organization encounters the same reality. People retire. People change roles. People leave. When that happens, businesses often discover that much of their operational consistency was never embedded into the company. It was embedded into individuals. Growth then becomes dependent on finding more experienced employees rather than creating an environment where every employee can perform at a consistently high level.
The strongest companies understand that experience should amplify performance, not enable it. Experience should help employees make better decisions, not determine whether they can make decisions at all.
The Real Problem Is Access to Knowledge
The companies that scale most effectively tend to approach this challenge differently. Rather than focusing exclusively on standardizing workflows, they focus on standardizing access to knowledge. Their objective is not to eliminate judgment, remove expertise, or replace experience. Their objective is to ensure that decisions begin from a shared understanding of the business.
This distinction is more important than it appears. Most companies have spent decades improving how information is stored. Far fewer have improved how information is accessed. Historical transactions exist. Customer history exists. Supplier performance data exists. Pricing history exists. Inventory history exists. Operational records exist. The challenge is rarely the absence of information. The challenge is the ability to transform information into usable knowledge at the moment a decision needs to be made.
Consider the five-question test again.
What pricing strategy should we use for this item?
What have we sold this part for previously?
Which customers purchase this part most often?
What lead time should we quote?
Which suppliers perform best for this component?
The issue isn't whether answers exist.
The issue is whether everyone has equal access to them.
That's why the challenge is not fundamentally about technology, process, reporting, or training. It is about organizational intelligence. Specifically, how effectively an organization can transform everything it already knows into decisions that can be repeated, scaled, and trusted.
From Searching for Answers to Asking for Answers
For decades, enterprise software has focused on recording activity. Transactions are captured. Quotes are stored. Customers are tracked. Inventory is managed. Supplier performance is measured. Reports are generated. Dashboards are built. Businesses today possess more operational information than at any point in history.
Yet information has little value if access to it remains inconsistent.
When an employee needs to determine a pricing strategy, understand historical sales activity, identify the best-performing supplier, evaluate customer purchasing behavior, or establish a realistic lead time, the answer often already exists somewhere within the organization. The challenge is that finding it may require navigating multiple systems, reviewing transactions, interpreting reports, searching documentation, or locating the one person who knows where to look.
The next evolution is not creating more information. It is making existing knowledge immediately accessible. This is the idea behind ELIA.
Not replacing experience.
Not replacing judgment.
Not replacing people.
Providing employees with immediate access to the operational intelligence that already exists throughout the organization.
Ask ELIA:
What pricing strategy should I use for this item?
ELIA can evaluate historical sales activity, customer purchasing patterns, prior margins, inventory positions, and similar transactions to provide immediate context.
What have we sold this part for previously?
ELIA can surface historical pricing, customers, quantities, trends, and outcomes without requiring employees to search through reports and transactions.
Which suppliers perform best for this component?
ELIA can identify supplier performance patterns based on actual operational history rather than memory alone.
These are not requests for data.
They're requests for organizational knowledge.
The companiesthat gain the greatest advantage from technologies like ELIA will not be those attempting to replace human decision-making. They will be those using technology to ensure that every decision begins from the same foundation of intelligence.
For decades, businesses have tried to create consistency through process.
The next generation of businesses may create consistency through knowledge.
Because when five employees are asked the same question, growth depends on getting five good answers.
Scale depends on getting one answer five times.
​Ralph Merhi is the CEO of ERP.Aero and a longtime advocate for using technology to simplify complex aviation operations. Throughout his career, he has worked with aviation suppliers, distributors, brokers, and MROs to improve how organizations manage inventory, quality, procurement, quoting, and customer engagement.
His focus is not simply on digitizing processes, but on helping businesses transform operational knowledge into better, faster, and more consistent decisions. He writes regularly about aviation technology, organizational intelligence, workflow automation, and the future of enterprise software.
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