The Myth of 'We'll Fix It Later' in Operations
Later is when you have more revenue, more orders, more team members, more suppliers, more complexity, and less time. The operation that would have taken two weeks to fix at ₹20 lakh monthly revenue takes four months to fix at ₹80 lakh monthly revenue and costs four months of the larger-scale version of the problem while you are fixing it.
Aditya Sharma
Author
'We'll fix it later' is the most expensive phrase in operations management. It is the phrase that converts a two-week fix into a four-month project, because the problem that was manageable at current scale is now embedded in a larger, more complex system where fixing it requires modifying more components, retraining more people, and accepting more operational disruption. It is also the phrase that converts a ₹50,000 fix into a ₹5 lakh problem, because the issue that costs ₹50,000 to address at ₹20 lakh monthly revenue has been generating ₹80,000 per month in operational cost for six months before 'later' arrived plus the cost of the larger-scale intervention now required. 'Later' is never cheaper. For operational problems with a compounding cost structure, 'later' is almost always three to five times more expensive than 'now.'
The Compounding Cost Structure of Deferred Operational Fixes
An operational problem has a compounding cost structure when its daily cost grows with the business rather than remaining fixed. A settlement reconciliation process that catches 60% of discrepancies produces a miss rate of 40% and the absolute value of that 40% miss rate grows with GMV. At ₹20 lakh monthly GMV with a 2% discrepancy rate and 40% miss rate, the monthly unrecovered amount is ₹16,000. At ₹80 lakh monthly GMV with the same parameters, the monthly unrecovered amount is ₹64,000 four times larger with no change in the underlying process quality. The cost of fixing the reconciliation process at ₹20 lakh GMV is the same as at ₹80 lakh approximately ₹25,000 to ₹50,000. The cost of deferring from ₹20 lakh to ₹80 lakh GMV (a 6-month period at the growth rates typical of a scaling D2C brand) is approximately ₹200,000 to ₹300,000 in unrecovered settlements the deferred fix cost.The dispatch error rate that generates 0.8% wrong dispatches at 500 monthly orders produces 4 wrong dispatches per month. At 3,000 monthly orders, the same 0.8% produces 24 wrong dispatches per month six times the customer damage, six times the reverse logistics cost, and six times the negative review risk. The fix cost (barcode scanning implementation, ₹40,000 to ₹80,000) is the same regardless of order volume. The six months of compounding wrong-dispatch cost between ₹500/month orders and ₹3,000/month orders is ₹40,000 to ₹80,000 in direct costs alone, plus the customer experience damage that does not appear as a direct cost.
The Triage Protocol: What to Fix Now vs Later
- Fix now (this week): any operational problem with a daily cost that exceeds ₹1,000 per day, or whose cumulative deferred cost over 90 days would exceed the fix cost; any problem affecting customer experience directly (wrong product, delivery failure, response delay) regardless of cost; any problem with a compounding cost structure where the cost at 3x current volume would be materially higher than the fix cost
- Fix next quarter: operational problems whose deferred cost over 90 days is less than the fix cost, but whose compounding structure will make them urgent at the next volume scale; process improvements that require significant team training or tool transitions that should be planned for a lower-volume period
- Fix later (only genuine candidates): operational problems where the deferred cost grows linearly with volume (not compounding), the fix cost is high relative to the deferred cost at the current and near-term scale, and there is a genuine plan for the specific trigger point that will initiate the fix
- Never 'fix later' without calculating the deferred cost: no operational problem should be deferred without an explicit calculation of the daily or monthly cost of deferral making the deferred cost explicit converts 'we'll fix it later' from a comfortable decision to a deliberate trade-off with known consequences
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