AutoCAD, Email and Excel: the Hidden Cost of Coordination in Italian Technical Firms
- Roberto Benanti
- Apr 3
- 3 min read
In Italian architecture and engineering firms, the problem is rarely a lack of technical skill. It's that technical skill is often blocked by an operational structure that can't keep pace: AutoCAD for production, email for coordination, Excel for deadlines. Three powerful tools, used for things they were never designed to do together.
This article isn't about replacing AutoCAD. It's the right tool for what it does. It's about everything that surrounds technical production: coordination, deadlines, client communication, and the hidden cost of managing all of it without a structured system.
The hidden cost of coordination in technical firms
In small and medium-sized technical firms, a significant portion of professionals' time is not spent designing. It's spent looking for information, asking for updates, and synchronising on who is doing what.
The patterns we observe most frequently in the technical firms we work with:
The Excel deadline sheet is never updated at the right moment. It gets filled in at the start of a project and then updated sporadically. When a deadline slips, the cascading impact on other activities isn't visible until someone spots it manually.
Emails become the project archive. Important decisions, design changes, client requests: everything ends up in email threads that after a few months nobody can follow anymore. Someone who joins the project halfway has no context.
The principal becomes the project's "switchboard". Without a central system, it's often the principal or project lead who acts as the coordination hub: they know where the files are, they know the status of project X, they manage the external consultants. This creates a bottleneck that doesn't scale.
What doesn't need to change (and what does)
AutoCAD doesn't need to be replaced. It's the right technical production tool for engineering and architecture firms. Project files stay where they are (server, NAS, cloud). Emails for client communication can remain.
What needs to be added is a coordination layer: a place where tasks, deadlines, dependencies between activities, and the progress status of each project all live. Not to replace AutoCAD or email, but alongside them, as the project's nervous system.
In the technical firms we've worked with, introducing Wrike as a coordination layer didn't require changing any of the technical tools. It required moving the management of "who does what and when" from email and Excel to a system designed specifically for that purpose.
What does the absence of a coordination system actually cost?
In the assessments we run before an implementation, we ask professionals to track for one week the time spent on coordination activities: looking for files, asking for updates, answering questions about project status, sending alignment emails.
The average result across the 4 technical firms we analysed: between 4 and 7 hours per week per professional, spent on pure coordination overhead. For a team of 8, that's 32 to 56 hours a week lost to organisational overhead.
When translated into lost billable hours or delivery delays that affect client satisfaction, the real cost of this overhead becomes rapidly evident.
How much time does your firm spend coordinating instead of designing?
At SBK Solutions we support technical firms in assessing and implementing project management systems that fit their operational reality. We always start from an analysis of the real workflow, without imposing structures that don't suit how the firm actually works.
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