Among the biggest problems facing small and medium-sized companies in Poland, staff shortages are frequently cited. The registered unemployment rate in October 2025 stood at 5.6% (source - PARP Report 10.2025). This translates into a shortage of hands to work, which is felt by companies looking for specialists. According to the report - nearly 80% of small and medium-sized European companies struggle to find qualified employees.
According to a report by - Zielona Linia GOV.PL, hiring problems affect:
- 70% of companies in the transport, logistics, and automotive sector
- 67% of companies in the life sciences and healthcare sector
- 62% of companies in the industry and raw materials sector
These numbers show just how valuable an employee is on the labor market today. Given such significant recruitment challenges, it's essential to make effective use of the working time of the people you already employ. ERP systems, such as Odoo, can help with this by automatically taking over part of the manual work. An engineer should be able to focus as much as possible on design, a salesperson on selling, and a production worker on production. Sounds obvious. But is it really that obvious?
- An engineer. Spends 45 minutes a week reporting working time. An hour searching for the right documents and Excel spreadsheets with data. Copying and retyping test results takes about 15 minutes every day - it has to be done, because another team uses a different tool. Finds out about stock shortages too late. As a result, they can't do their job, because they have to wait for materials.
- Customer service. Every client generates manual work. You have to keep a history of contacts. If a client places an order, you need to notify the right people, log the order in several spreadsheets. Call the warehouse, call production. Make sure everything will be on time. Another client often interrupts the workflow.
- A test engineer. The company rolled out several tools over time, and each one was eventually abandoned. There was never a plan. Now a new manager has arrived and decided the team will use yet another piece of software - starting immediately. Nobody analyzed whether such a rollout made sense. In the first week she spent several hours learning the tool, and it still didn't solve her problems. And she's worried that something new will be rolled out again soon, without a specialist or any training on how to use it.
These are examples drawn from conversations with employees of manufacturing and engineering companies. This is how you lose employees' time, money... and often the employees themselves. When the amount of repetitive, non-creative work is too high relative to creative work, it leads to disengagement. That lowers productivity and can lead to people quitting. The staffing problem gets worse.
That's why the fight against staff shortages should start with giving employees the right tools. Not convinced? What would you think of a doctor who had to spend 60% of their working time on paperwork? A waste of time, isn't it? The same thing may be happening in your company, but all you're noticing is the staff shortage.
You gain on two fronts -
- You give employees the right tools, which increases their engagement and effectiveness
- You show candidates that professionalism matters at your company, which makes it easier to recruit specialists
Importantly, Odoo automates the boring, repetitive tasks that specialists waste time on unnecessarily. Employees want to do their jobs effectively and want to feel a sense of professionalism. The right tool will make them start working more efficiently on their own - because they'll no longer have to focus on dozens of side issues, only on solving the one main problem.
Thanks to this, you'll save dozens of hours of their time every week. You'll increase your employees' effective working time without increasing headcount.
Want to implement ERP at your company?
Implementing an ERP system is a process. You can quickly implement a system and automate individual processes, but in the long run that won't deliver results. Your company is a system of interconnected dependencies. At Adapt IT, before implementation we carry out a paid analysis, build an implementation plan, and estimate the return. When the implementation is justified (ROI), we implement it.
Learn more about the service - Action Plan - Production Digitalization