Debrecen is accelerating.Can your business keep pace?

The visible side of Debrecen’s growth is taking shape at new factory gates. The less visible side is decided inside a local business: how many enquiries go unanswered, how often the same information is entered twice, and how many decisions wait until the owner is available. The next competitive advantage may be found in those minutes.

Picture a Monday morning. Three enquiries arrive, a customer wants to reschedule, and the accountant needs a missing document. The customer record is in a spreadsheet, the conversation is in a colleague’s inbox, and the agreement is in the owner’s head. Everyone is working. Yet the work is waiting.

This is an illustrative scenario, but the management question is practical: could today’s operation cope with more orders tomorrow? That is a useful starting point for understanding the business value of digitalisation.

The pace of the city and the pace of the business

BMW Group officially opened its Debrecen plant in September 2025.^[1] An investment of that scale prompts local businesses to consider their place in a changing economy. Opportunities may extend beyond direct suppliers to service providers, technical businesses and other commercial partners.

Proximity alone does not win an order. Reliability needs to be supported by delivery dates, retrievable documents and traceable work. Actual supplier requirements depend on the contract; buying a particular system does not automatically open the door.

Preparing for growth therefore starts with everyday operations. If each new customer brings more manual coordination, more opportunities for error and another evening of administration, higher sales can also mean an overloaded organisation. This is particularly relevant when recruiting another employee is already difficult.

A spreadsheet is not yet a workflow

According to Eurostat, 71% of EU SMEs reached at least a basic level of digital intensity in 2025. This means using at least four of the twelve technologies measured in the survey.^[2] The indicator provides useful context, but it does not tell us how quickly an individual business moves from an enquiry to delivery.

A company can have a modern website, cloud email and several subscriptions while its employees still copy the same information from one window to another. The digital convenience people enjoy in their personal lives does not automatically change the way a business operates.

Excel is a useful tool for calculations and analysis. When several people also use it to manage customers, deadlines and responsibilities, three questions emerge: which information is current, who acts next, and how do we know something has stalled? A well-designed system provides a shared, verifiable answer.

Tomorrow is too late to sell today’s empty appointment

The relationship is especially clear in a service business. A cancelled or forgotten appointment is capacity tied to a particular moment. Once that moment has passed, it cannot be filled retrospectively. An online calendar is therefore only the beginning.

In a complete workflow, the customer receives a clear confirmation, a timely reminder and a straightforward way to reschedule or cancel. The business can offer an opening to someone on a waiting list. The employee can see what changed and whether intervention is needed.

Research supports the usefulness of reminders: a 2013 Cochrane review of healthcare appointments found higher attendance in groups receiving text-message reminders than in groups receiving none. The evidence was of low to moderate quality; it does not justify promising a savings percentage to every salon, repair business or consultancy.^[3]

Measure your own no-show rate, how much notice cancellations provide, and how many released slots you refill. When valuing a recovered booking, consider the variable cost of delivering the service as well as its revenue.

Enter once, follow through

A shared customer and workflow system becomes useful when it reflects how the business actually works. An enquiry arrives through the website. A customer record is created. The quotation gets an owner and a deadline. Once accepted, delivery begins, followed by invoicing after the necessary approval. Status changes and earlier conversations remain attached to the same case.

This does not necessarily require replacing every existing tool. A CRM, invoicing software and an internal register can exchange information through supported interfaces. A ready-made connector may cover a straightforward need; specific business rules may require custom development.

The important questions start with exceptions. What happens if a tax number is missing? Who can approve a discount? How is a failed transfer detected? Which system holds the authoritative record? The quality of automation also depends on how visible and recoverable the process remains when something unexpected happens.

One limit to growth is the work that must be repeated manually for every new customer.

Before calculating payback, define the benefit

Consider a transparent, illustrative example. Each month, a business handles 300 data-entry tasks, 40 quotations and 120 coordination tasks. The proposed workflow would remove 4 minutes from each task in the first group, 15 minutes in the second and 4 minutes in the third. The total difference is 38 hours a month.

At a total labour cost of HUF 5,000 per hour, this represents HUF 190,000 of capacity value. It does not automatically reduce spending by HUF 190,000: with salaries unchanged, the team has more time available for other work.

Suppose 12 of those 38 hours genuinely replace paid overtime or outsourced administration. At the same hourly rate, expenditure falls by HUF 60,000. If the system costs HUF 20,000 a month to run, net monthly cash savings are HUF 40,000. Total initial expenditure of HUF 1.2 million would then have a simple payback period of 30 months.

This example assumes the same workload each month and excludes financing and tax effects. Training, data preparation and transition must be included in initial expenditure. Additional work enabled by the released time should be valued separately, using actual demand and contribution margin, without counting the same hour twice.

Employees’ time and the role of AI

Introducing a system requires attention and learning from the people who will use it. Start the design process with them: what information do they search for every day, which errors do they regularly correct, and where do they always have to ask someone else? The answers often produce a more useful development brief than a long feature demonstration.

AI is also most useful when it has a clear task. It can prepare an email draft, organise incoming enquiries or extract information from documents. Prices, contractual commitments and important customer decisions still require review and appropriate authority. The system should also make it clear when information is insufficient.

In the OECD’s 2025 figures for countries with available data, 20.2% of firms used AI. The proportion was 17.4% for small firms and 52% for large firms.^[4] These are not Hungarian SME figures, and adoption alone does not establish a return. In an individual business, correction effort, turnaround time and work quality determine whether a use case is worthwhile.

Security belongs in the operating model

Decide during planning who can view customer information, change prices or access the full database. A backup is useful when it can actually be restored. Activity logs help establish what happened when a change is disputed.

Preparing the team also matters when using AI: the European Commission’s guidance explains that the AI Act requires providers and deployers to take measures supporting the development of AI literacy.^[5] Cybersecurity obligations require an assessment of the organisation’s actual scope. Hungary’s rules associated with NIS2 do not simply apply to every SME in the same way; the SZTFH identifies the statutory scope and business activities as starting points for that assessment.^[6]

The practical consequence is straightforward: access controls, data handling and responsibility for operation should be part of the project brief. Resolving them afterwards is much harder.

The first ninety days

For a manageable implementation, I would begin with one process: frequent enough to measure and contained enough for the team to understand.

1. First 30 days: map the work. Follow real cases through the business. Measure elapsed time and effort, identify repetition, assign a process owner and define the intended result.
2. Next 30 days: run a focused pilot. Start with a small team or one type of case. Test incorrect information, changes and reversals as well as the expected path. Improve the workflow using participants’ feedback.
3. Third 30 days: evaluate. Compare results with the starting point. Check whether people actually use the system, whether manual work has fallen, and what would justify expanding it.

This is a possible schedule, not a deadline applicable to every project. The principle is to proceed in measurable steps. Fully automating a disorganised process can simply make the disorganisation move faster.

What stops when the owner disappears for two days?

A longer-term benefit of digitalisation is that the business may become less dependent on one person’s memory. Documented processes, clean customer records and traceable delivery can make management handovers, succession and a future buyer’s due diligence easier. They do not automatically produce a higher valuation: earnings, customer relationships and a durable organisation still matter.

Debrecen’s development may prompt many businesses to reconsider their plans. Their next step can nevertheless be small: recovering a lost enquiry, eliminating repeatedly copied information or giving an unowned deadline a responsible person.

What would stop in your business if you switched off your phone for two days? The answer is a good place to look for the first development project.