What Changes as You Grow
Arrangements that work at one site fail at twenty, and the transition points are predictable enough to plan for.
Putting it in · Analysis
Most trouble in this category is an arrangement that was right at a previous size and was never revisited.
What breaks, and roughly when
One global radius. Fine at one site, wrong at the second, unworkable at ten.
Manual correction approval by the owner. Fine at fifty people, a bottleneck at three hundred.
Radii set once. Entrances move, buildings change, and nobody re-measures.
Informal fallback — ask the supervisor. Works where the supervisor is always present, fails at sites where they are not.
One person who understands the system. Works until they take leave during a payroll week.
A shared site login. Convenient at one site, meaningless as an audit trail at twenty.
The pattern
Each fails through accumulation rather than an event.
Nobody notices the day the fifth site was added with the default radius.
It is noticed months later as a refusal rate nobody could explain.
Which is the argument for the weekly per-site refusal figure: the value is catching a crossing while it is small.
The triggers to watch
Refusal rate diverging between sites — radii need per-site attention.
Correction turnaround lengthening — approval needs distributing.
Fallback usage climbing at one site — that site needs a different method.
Access list growing — a review is overdue.
Any of these crossing a threshold means the current arrangement has expired.
What to put in early
Cheap when small, expensive to retrofit.
Per-site radii from the start, even if the first two are similar.
Named approvers per site rather than one central one.
Individual logins, never shared.
A documented measurement procedure, so a new site can be set up correctly by someone else.
A deputy owner.
The size-related purchase mistake
Buying a product that only supports one global radius, which is invisible at one site and fatal at ten.
Ask about per-site configuration during procurement, because it is the limitation that most reliably ends a deployment early.
Ask about per-site radii
The limitation that most reliably ends a deployment early.
Invisible at one site.
Fatal at ten, where a single global number refuses everyone at half of them.
Ask during procurement, not after.
Several products cannot do it, and that fact is worth more than most of the feature list.
Check the difficult case
Use workforce optimisation software to frame one representative test. The useful evidence is the record created when an employee corrects an entry and an administrator exports it.