Ask a manufacturing sales team how much time they lose each week chasing down customer information, and most will underestimate it. According to SuperOffice's research into 161 manufacturing decision-makers across European markets, specifically Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, 43% spend four hours or more a week searching for or updating customer information, roughly half a working day, every week, spent looking instead of selling.

This article looks at how to reduce time spent on customer admin: how much time is going missing, why it happens, and what closes the gap.

How much time is actually going missing?

More than most teams assume. 43% of manufacturers spend four or more hours a week searching for, updating or otherwise looking for customer information, roughly half a working day, every week, spent looking instead of selling. Only 11% spend less than an hour a week on this. The rest fall between: 43% spend one to three hours, 37% spend four to six hours, and 6% spend more than six hours.

Put together, 89% of manufacturers spend at least an hour a week on this, and close to half spend enough time on it that it shows up as a real chunk of the working week, not a rounding error.

Want to see how this fits the wider research? Explore the complete European manufacturing research →

Why the time keeps disappearing

The time isn't lost to any single cause. It's lost to how many places a team has to check before they're confident they have the full picture. Customer information at manufacturers is commonly split across an ERP system (41%), a dedicated CRM (39%), shared spreadsheets (33%), individual email inboxes (29%) and paper records (17%), often several of these at the same company.

When the answer to a simple question, has this customer ordered more this quarter, what did we promise them last time, could be sitting in any of five places, finding it takes time even when everyone involved is doing their job well.

The habit behind the hours

Fragmented storage is only part of the story. How manufacturers manage customer relationships day to day plays a role too. 52% describe their approach as relationship-led but informal, strong relationships exist, but they depend on the individual, not a documented process. A further 11% call their approach reactive. Combined, 63% of manufacturers run customer relationships without a structured, proactive system behind them.

Informal habits and scattered systems reinforce each other. Without a shared process for where information goes, everyone develops their own way of keeping track, which is exactly what makes it hard for anyone else to find quickly.

What changes when the process is structured

The clearest evidence that structure saves time comes from comparing manufacturers who already describe their approach as structured and proactive against everyone else. Manufacturers with a structured, proactive approach report spending four or more hours a week searching for customer information far less often, 25%, compared with 46% of everyone else.

That's close to half the rate. It's worth being precise about what this comparison shows: it's a correlation between a self-described way of working and self-reported time spent, not a controlled study of any specific tool. Only 15% of manufacturers describe themselves as structured and proactive, so treat this as strong directional evidence rather than proof that structure alone accounts for the full difference.

Why this costs more in manufacturing

Lost admin time is expensive everywhere, but it lands differently in manufacturing. Sales cycles are long, deals are technical, and growth is concentrated in a relatively small number of high-value accounts. The same research found that 76% of manufacturers expect most of their growth to come from customers they already have, not new business.

 Every hour spent reconstructing an account's history from an ERP report, a spreadsheet and an old email thread is an hour not spent on the accounts responsible for most of next year's growth. In a high-volume sales model, lost admin time is a drag on efficiency. In manufacturing, it competes directly with the growth plan itself.

What closes the gap

Reducing time spent on customer admin doesn't start with asking people to work faster. It starts with reducing the number of places they have to look.

In practice, that means:

• One shared account record, combining order history from the ERP with communication history, so answering a routine question doesn't require checking several systems.
• Consistent, default storage, so information goes to the same place regardless of who's handling the account.
• Fewer manual updates, by connecting systems that already hold relevant data instead of asking someone to re-enter it.
• Ownership per account, so the record stays current as work happens, rather than needing a clean-up before every customer meeting.

This is a large part of what a platform like SuperOffice CRM for manufacturing is built to remove, not extra work, but the time spent piecing together information that already exists somewhere else. It's part of the same pattern found across the wider research: SuperOffice's manufacturing research found the same gap between intent and practice showing up across most areas of customer management, not only admin time.

The bottom line

Lost admin time rarely gets tracked on its own line. It shows up as a slower response, a delayed follow-up, or a quiet accumulation of hours nobody adds up until someone asks where the week went.

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