Big infrastructure bets start with small operational decisions

If you run a Malaysian SME, you may look at a multibillion-dollar tunnel project and think it has little to do with your daily work. Your problems are more immediate: delayed deliveries, crowded shop locations, slow approvals, scattered customer information, and staff spending too much time repeating manual tasks.

But the important lesson is not the tunnel itself. It is how a company turns a difficult, physical problem into a repeatable system. The Boring Company has raised a US$3 billion Series D round, with the United Arab Emirates leading the investment, and plans to develop more than 150 kilometres of tunnels in the UAE.

TL;DR: The story is really about building systems that remove repeated bottlenecks. You can apply the same thinking to your SME by mapping delays, standardising routine work, and using automation where it improves flow.

The aim is not to copy a large technology company. It is to make your business easier to run, easier to measure, and less dependent on one person remembering every step.

What This Means

The Boring Company’s stated goal is to address traffic by moving vehicles into an underground, three-dimensional network of tunnels. Its existing work includes tunnels connecting hotel casinos and a convention centre in Las Vegas, while a project in Nashville is planned as a 10-mile underground loop.

In plain language, the company is trying to solve a flow problem. Too many vehicles use the same limited roads, creating delays and congestion. Its proposed answer is to create another layer of movement underneath the existing one.

Your SME may not have roads or tunnels, but it has similar “congestion”. Leads wait for replies. Orders sit in inboxes. Staff re-enter the same customer information into several spreadsheets. Managers wait for updates before making decisions. A small number of repeated bottlenecks can slow the whole business.

The useful question is not “What technology should you buy?” It is “Where does work keep getting stuck, and what repeatable system could keep it moving?”

A simple comparison

Large infrastructure idea	SME equivalent	Practical response
More routes for traffic	Clearer routes for enquiries and orders	Use a shared customer and task workflow
Standard tunnel design	Standard operating procedure	Document the same steps for recurring work
Central control of movement	Visibility of business activity	Track status, owner and next action
Phased construction	Gradual process improvement	Start with one high-volume workflow

How This Applies to Malaysian SMEs

For retail and online sellers, the bottleneck is often order coordination. A customer may ask a question through WhatsApp, place an order through an online marketplace, and later request an exchange through social media. If each channel is handled separately, your team can miss messages, duplicate updates, or lose track of the next step. A simple workflow can bring the customer name, order status, payment confirmation, delivery details and follow-up task into one shared record. This does not remove the need for personal service. It gives your team a reliable route for delivering it.

For contractors, renovation firms and service businesses, the challenge is usually field coordination. You may have workers visiting several sites while quotations, photographs, materials and client approvals remain in different chats. A practical system can create a job record when an enquiry arrives, assign a person responsible, set reminders for site visits, and collect completion evidence in one place. When a customer asks for an update, you can check the job status instead of asking several staff members to search their phones.

For professional services such as accounting, recruitment, training and agencies, repeated approvals create hidden congestion. A client document may wait for review, then wait again for a correction, then return to a manager for final approval. You can map these stages and define what happens at each one: who receives the item, what information is required, when a reminder is sent, and how the final result is recorded. This makes the process more consistent when your business is busy or a key employee is away.

For restaurants, wholesalers and manufacturers, stock and supplier information often moves too slowly. A staff member notices that an item is running low, tells a supervisor, and someone later checks a spreadsheet or calls a supplier. A better workflow can record stock alerts, assign purchasing responsibility, and show which items are awaiting confirmation. You do not need a sophisticated factory system to begin. You need accurate information, clear ownership and a visible next action.

In each case, the principle is the same: identify the route work already takes, then remove unnecessary stops. Automation is most useful after the process is understood. If the process is unclear, automating it may simply make confusion happen faster.

Practical Takeaways

Use this checklist to find one workflow worth improving first:

• List the frequent delays: Ask your team where work waits, gets repeated, or needs a manager’s reminder.
• Choose one workflow: Start with enquiries, quotations, orders, appointments, collections or service jobs—not everything at once.
• Write the current steps: Record what happens from the first request to completion, including handovers and approvals.
• Remove unnecessary handovers: Decide whether the same information is being copied between WhatsApp, spreadsheets and email.
• Assign one owner per stage: Every task should have a named person responsible for the next action.
• Set automatic reminders: Use reminders for follow-ups, expiring quotations, appointments and overdue approvals.
• Keep a simple status list: For example: New, In Progress, Waiting for Customer, Approved, Completed and Closed.
• Measure before and after: Track practical indicators such as response time, overdue tasks, missed follow-ups and completion time.
• Review weekly: Ask what still gets stuck and adjust the workflow rather than blaming individuals.

Questions to ask before automating

1. What is the customer or staff member trying to achieve?
2. Where does the information first enter the business?
3. Who needs to see it next?
4. What decision or action is required?
5. What happens if nobody responds?
6. What should be recorded when the work is complete?

The Bigger Picture

The funding story also shows that large infrastructure projects depend on confidence in a repeatable model. The Boring Company’s valuation reportedly reached US$23 billion after the funding round, while the company is expanding beyond its earlier Las Vegas work into projects in the UAE and Nashville.

For your SME, long-term growth depends on a similar shift. You cannot personally remember every customer promise, approve every quotation, check every delivery and train every new employee forever. Growth becomes difficult when your business operates mainly through memory, private messages and informal instructions.

A documented and automated workflow creates a stronger operating foundation. It helps new staff understand what to do, gives managers better visibility, and allows you to spend more time on customers, partnerships and decisions that require your judgement.

Start small. Pick one process that happens often and causes visible frustration. Map it, simplify it, assign responsibility and automate the predictable parts. Once that route works, you can improve the next one.

The lesson from the tunnel investment is not that every SME needs advanced infrastructure. It is that ambitious outcomes require well-designed routes. In your business, the best route may be a clear enquiry pipeline, an organised job board, an automatic reminder or a single source of truth for customer information.

When work flows clearly, your team can handle more activity without adding confusion.

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