Payments confirmed and production data ready, without anyone chasing it.
The problem
The business could not take on more customers. When we looked at the process, the time was going into two places: getting the data production needed for each order, and confirming payments.
Every order started as an invoice. Someone had to read it, copy the details into the production workflow and work out the hardware specification the job needed. Payments had to be checked by hand before work could move. When the right person was busy, orders simply waited.
What we changed
- Automatic extraction of order information from incoming invoices
- Direct updates into the production workflow, so jobs appear where the team already works
- Automatic preparation of hardware specifications for each order
- Payment confirmation handled by the system, so nobody checks each one by hand
- Checks and alerts, so the team is told when something needs a human look
The result
The time spent confirming payments dropped by over 80 percent. The time spent getting production the data it needs dropped by 40 percent.
The system has run for about ten months with minimal manual intervention, and the team's time goes into making products instead of moving data.
The lesson: the biggest gains often come from the boring handovers between steps, not from the steps themselves.