Does improving systems count as “research experience” in grad application? Like What is exactly meant by “research experience” in grad application? but situation-specific:


Between graduating master's in 2016 and applying now for PhD admissions for 2018-9, I started teaching maths at a branch of a company that is something like Kumon.
During this time, I looked up Google Sheets and SQL programming to learn on my own supplemented by my experience with Excel in master's and then created paperless spreadsheet templates.
I wasn't guided, instructed, requested or paid to do this, but I did improve processes at work.


Could said looking up then creation count as "research" ? If so, how? If not, why?

From other post:


  As a rule of thumb, the more that what you did was something other people could not have done


Additional comments based on aforementioned:


Well I think what I did would've been pretty simple for a/an CS/Engineering/IT/ICT person but not just any employee in my company could've developed the paperless systems I made.
Also, the IT department in my company didn't for reasons I guess I'm not allowed to disclose.
No. Research is working towards creating new knowledge (not just knowledge that you didn't have, knowledge that is genuinely new to experts in your field, too) that advances the state of the art in your field.  

Programming/IT/engineering work is not research, unless it is undertaken to create new knowledge.

Examples: 


Writing code to simulate a physical system, so as to answer questions about its behavior that have not been addressed yet, is part of doing research. 
Writing code to implement a new kind of wireless communication system, so as to evaluate its performance, is part of doing research. 
Writing code to help me organize my students' homework submissions is useful work, but it's not research.