Cut the cost of the work software should already be doing
Your teams spend their week retyping, checking, chasing and reconciling. We measure what that costs, rebuild the process as automation, and route only the genuine exceptions to a person. Then we hand you the numbers that prove it worked.
- 140+
- Automated processes in production
- $310M
- Client cost identified for removal
- 6.8 mo
- Median payback across engagements
Supplier invoice processing
Manufacturing group · 8 entities
- Invoice arrivesPDF, scan or EDI1/5
- Extraction and validationSupplier, lines, tax, totals2/5
- Three-way matchAgainst PO and goods receipt3/5
- Posting to ERPAutomatic for clean matches4/5
- Exception reviewOnly genuine mismatches5/5
8 hrs
Cycle time
99.2%
First-pass accuracy
$1.4M
Annual cost removed
Illustrative engagement. Figures replaced with your measured baseline during assessment.
Trusted with production automation by
- Northwind Group
- Meridian Financial
- Cascade Logistics
- Halden Industrial
- Vector Health
- Ashford & Bell
- Kestrel Energy
The real cost of manual work
Nobody budgets for the process. It gets paid for out of margin.
You are paying salaries for retyping
Every copy-paste between systems is a person converting one format into another. It produces nothing, it is invisible in the reporting, and it consumes the most expensive resource you have.
A single employee at 12 hours a week on manual data handling costs roughly $28,000 a year in fully loaded salary. Ten of them is a quarter of a million dollars spent on transcription.
Rework costs more than the original work
An error caught in the same hour costs minutes. The same error caught at reconciliation costs a correction cycle, a reconciliation exercise, a customer conversation and sometimes a payment you cannot reverse.
Manual processes typically run 2–8% error rates. At an eight-step cycle, the cost of finding and fixing a defect is an order of magnitude higher than preventing it at entry.
Cycle time is set by the queue, not the work
The actual task takes minutes. The elapsed time is days, because the process waits in inboxes, on batching windows and in approval queues where no work is happening at all.
Where the work itself takes under 15 minutes and the process takes 5 days, roughly 99% of elapsed time is waiting. Customers experience the wait, not the work.
Cost scales linearly with growth
When volume doubles, manual capacity has to double with it. Headcount becomes the variable cost of revenue, so margin never improves as the business gets bigger. Automation is the only lever that breaks that line.
A process automated at 80% coverage means a 100% volume increase needs roughly a 20% capacity increase. The same growth on a manual process needs 100%.
You cannot see what the process costs
Nobody holds a number for cost per transaction, so nobody can tell whether the process is improving, degrading or quietly getting worse. Unmeasured processes drift, and drift is expensive.
In most assessments we find the internal estimate of process cost is between 30% and 60% below the measured figure, once rework, chasing, supervision and tool-handling time are included.
Your best people are doing your worst work
The analysts, engineers and specialists you fought to hire spend a meaningful share of the week on administration. The cost is not only their salary — it is the judgement they were hired to exercise and are not exercising.
Retention follows this. Roles dominated by manual handling have markedly higher attrition, so the true cost includes recruitment and ramp on a repeat cycle.
These are estimates until they are your numbers.
Put your process into the calculator and see what it costs today, what automation removes, and how long the build takes to pay for itself. It takes about ninety seconds.
See it running
The same month of work, handled two ways
A shared services team keying supplier invoices into an ERP. Fourteen people, and the queue still grows.
Add extra people. Capacity is now 45.9/hr against 58/hr arriving — still a deficit of 12.1 every working hour. Keeping pace by hand takes about 18 people, because rework eats 22% of the raw capacity.
0
invoices waiting
Queue drain: caught up
Capacity 45.9/hr against 58/hr arriving — a deficit of 12.1 items every working hour.
- Handled
- 0
- Cost to date
- $0
0
invoices waiting
Queue drain: caught up
88% of arrivals need no human touch. Only genuine exceptions reach the 4-person review queue.
- Handled
- 0
- Cost to date
- $0
Queue size over the modelled month
invoices waiting at the end of each working hourAn illustration, not a measurement. The arrival rate, staffing, error rate and run cost in this scenario are modelled assumptions chosen to reflect a real engagement, and no client figures are shown. The arithmetic mirrors the ROI calculator, including charging the automated lane for the cost of running it.
What we build
What we build, and what makes it pay
Workflow automation (AI/RPA)
Remove the manual steps, not just the keystrokes.
We take the processes your teams run by hand every day — invoice processing, order entry, document handling, approvals, reconciliation, reporting — and rebuild them as monitored automation with humans only where judgement is genuinely required.
- 70–92%
- of routine transactions automated end to end
- 3–6×
- faster average cycle time
Custom internal software & agent tools
Software shaped around your process, not the other way round.
When the process is specific to how your business actually works, off-the-shelf tools force your teams into someone else's workflow. We build the internal applications, portals and AI agents that fit the process as it is — and integrate them into the systems of record you already have.
- 1–2 quarters
- from kickoff to first production release
- 40–70%
- reduction in time-on-task for the core workflow
Platform builds
When the automation becomes a product, not a project.
Some automations stop being internal tools and start being products — a service you sell, a platform your partners operate on, or a capability that has to run across dozens of business units with tenant isolation, metering and SLAs. We engineer for that from the start.
- 99.9%+
- availability target with a defined error budget
- N tenants
- on one codebase instead of N forks
Automation consulting
Know which automations will pay before you build any of them.
Most automation budgets are spent on the wrong processes. We measure your operation, rank every candidate by value and feasibility, build the financial model for each, and hand you a sequenced roadmap you can execute with us or without us.
- 2–4 weeks
- from kickoff to a costed, ranked roadmap
- 5–20×
- typical spread in return between the best and worst candidate
And 7 more capabilities
See how they fit togetherAssess
Measure the process, rank every candidate, and cost the business case before any build spend is committed.
Build
Integrate against your real systems, put the first process into production, document it and hand it over.
Operate
Monitor it, report the return against the modelled case, and expand coverage as each process proves itself.
Your numbers, not ours
Find out what the process costs before anyone tries to sell you anything
Your process
Start with the process that most of your people touch most often.
How many people spend time on this work today, including anyone who only touches it for approvals or checks.
Time spent on the manual work itself per person per week. Include checking, chasing and re-keying.
Salary plus benefits, overhead and equipment. A $75,000 salary is roughly $45 per hour loaded.
Share of transactions that need correcting. Most manual processes sit between 2% and 8%.
48 strips out public holidays and leave. Drop this if the process is seasonal.
The share of the process that can realistically run without a person. We rarely commit above 85% before an assessment.
Net annual savings
$75,235
After subtracting $30,000 a year to run the automation, on a Single process scope.
This is a viable automation with a defensible case
The payback sits in the normal range for an enterprise automation engagement. An assessment would confirm the measured baseline and tighten these numbers before any build commitment.
Payback period
13.6 months
3-year ROI
166%
Hours reclaimed / yr
2,339
Capacity reclaimed
1.2 FTE
Cost today
$150K
Labour plus rework
Annual savings
$105K
Before run cost
3-year net
$141K
After implementation
Where the money goes today
At 70% coverage, the automation removes $105,235 of the $150,336 this process costs today, and costs $30,000 a year to operate.
Cumulative position over three years
$85K build · $3K/mo runThis is a model, not a quote. It assumes labour cost is the only cost removed, that rework effort is twice the original handling time, and that run cost is fixed at the selected scope. An assessment replaces every one of those assumptions with your measured numbers.
How we calculate this
- Cost today — annual hours (people × hours per week × working weeks) at the fully loaded hourly rate, plus rework: annual hours × error rate × rework effort, at the same rate.
- Savings — both labour and rework cost are reduced by the automation coverage figure, because coverage is a property of the process rather than of a single cost line.
- Net savings — gross savings minus the annual run cost for the selected scope. Platform hosting, support and maintenance are included there.
- Payback — the implementation cost divided by monthly net savings. It is measured after running costs, so a system that only just pays back its savings does not appear to pay back its build.
- Three-year ROI — three years of net savings minus the implementation cost, divided by the implementation cost.
Deliberately excluded: revenue upside from faster cycle times, reduced attrition in automated roles, and avoided hiring at growth. Those are real but difficult to attribute, so the case stands without them.
This calculator models one process. Most of the value comes from the second and third process that reuse the same integration layer — which is what an assessment ranks for you.
Open full calculatorHow it works
Measure, model, build, operate — in that order
Audit
1–3 weeks
We measure the process as it actually runs, not as it is described in the documentation.
You get
A measured baseline you can hold us to.
What happens
- Structured interviews with process owners and the people doing the work
- Volumes, touch counts, cycle times and exception rates captured at transaction level
- Fully loaded cost per transaction reconciled against finance data
- Systems, data quality and integration constraints mapped
- Confidence level stated for every figure we report
Model the return
1–2 weeks
Before anyone writes code, you see the number — investment, savings, payback and what happens if adoption is lower than planned.
You get
A defensible business case per initiative, and a sequenced roadmap.
What happens
- Target coverage agreed per process, with the reasoning stated
- Implementation effort estimated as a range with assumptions exposed
- Gross and net annual savings, plus ongoing run cost
- Payback period and three-year return, with sensitivity analysis
- Ranked shortlist so you can stop at any point and still have value
Build & integrate
6–14 weeks per process
We build against your systems, not a demo environment, and put the first process into production while the rest are still in progress.
You get
Working automation in production, with tests and documentation.
What happens
- Integration against ERP, CRM, ITSM and document stores through supported interfaces
- Deterministic rules wherever the logic is stable; models only for genuinely unstructured input
- Confidence thresholds with a human review queue for exceptions
- Access control inherited from your identity provider
- First process live before the engagement closes out
Operate & expand
Ongoing
Automation that is not monitored is automation that will fail quietly. We run what we build and expand it as coverage proves itself.
You get
A running capability with a measured, reported return.
What happens
- Throughput, accuracy and cost-per-transaction dashboards
- Alerting on failure, drift and volume anomalies; failed runs replayable after fix
- A named support path with agreed response times
- Quarterly review of coverage and the next highest-value candidate
- Handover to your team whenever you want to take it in-house
Where we work
Different sectors, the same three problems
Financial services
Banks, insurers and asset managers running on reconciliation, onboarding and reporting processes that have grown by accretion rather than design.
- Client onboarding and KYC document collection with exception routing
- Reconciliation across ledgers, custodians and payment rails
- Claims intake, triage and document extraction
- +2 more in scope
Sector constraint
Auditability first — every automated decision needs a reconstructable trail, and model output has to be explainable to a regulator.
Logistics & supply chain
Operators and 3PLs where margin depends on how fast documents, exceptions and order changes move between systems and partners.
- Order entry from unstructured customer emails and portals
- Freight documentation, customs paperwork and carrier matching
- Exception management for delays, damages and short shipments
- +2 more in scope
Sector constraint
Partner-facing integration — the automation has to speak whatever format each counterparty can actually produce.
Healthcare operations
Providers, payers and healthcare service organisations buried in prior authorisations, scheduling administration and clinical documentation handling.
- Prior authorisation submission and status chasing
- Patient intake forms, eligibility checks and referral routing
- Clinical document indexing into records systems
- +2 more in scope
Sector constraint
PHI handling — the build must satisfy HIPAA, run inside approved environments and never persist identifiable data outside the agreed boundary.
Professional services
Legal, accounting and advisory firms where billable time is the product and administration is the silent margin leak.
- Engagement letters, conflict checks and new-matter opening
- Document review, extraction and chronologies from large filesets
- Time capture, billing narrative generation and write-off analysis
- +2 more in scope
Sector constraint
Confidentiality per matter — retrieval and AI assistance must be scoped so no client's data can surface in another's work.
Manufacturing
Multi-site manufacturers coordinating production, quality and procurement through a patchwork of ERP modules and spreadsheets.
- Purchase order processing and supplier confirmation chasing
- Quality incident intake, root-cause routing and CAPA tracking
- Production reporting consolidation across sites
- +2 more in scope
Sector constraint
Plant-floor reality — systems are older, connectivity is uneven, and automation has to degrade gracefully when a site goes offline.
Energy & utilities
Utilities and energy operators managing field work, regulatory obligations and asset documentation at volume.
- Work order creation, dispatch and completion verification
- Meter data validation and anomaly investigation
- Asset documentation and inspection record handling
- +2 more in scope
Sector constraint
Regulated reporting windows — submissions have hard deadlines and near-zero tolerance for incomplete evidence packs.
Results
What the work looks like when it lands
Global manufacturer
Invoice processing cut from 11 days to under 1
A 14-person shared services team was keying supplier invoices from PDFs and scanned images into SAP across eight entities. Cycle time averaged eleven days, first-pass accuracy was 78%, and duplicate payments were being caught only at reconciliation.
- 11 days → 8 hours
- Average invoice cycle time
- 78% → 99.2%
- First-pass posting accuracy
- $1.4M
- Annual processing cost removed
The team did not get smaller because people were let go. It got smaller on the work that was never worth a person's time, and those people now handle the cases that actually need judgement.
— Shared Services Director, Manufacturing
Asset management firm
Client onboarding accelerated from 3 weeks to 2 days
New institutional accounts moved through seven manual handoffs — KYC documentation collection, verification, account setup, and internal sign-off — with no visibility into where a case had stalled. Sales escalated weekly and compliance had no audit trail.
- 15 days → 2 days
- Median time to account open
- 94%
- Of documents collected without manual chasing
- 100%
- Of decisions with a reconstructable audit trail
We stopped managing a queue and started managing exceptions. The compliance evidence also got better, which was not the outcome we were optimising for but was the one our auditors cared about.
— Head of Client Operations, Financial services
Regional utility
Field engineers replaced three systems and a spreadsheet
Field crews worked from printed job sheets, a mobile app nobody trusted, and a scheduling spreadsheet maintained by two dispatchers. Completion data was re-keyed the following day, so the control room was always working from yesterday's picture.
- 3 → 1
- Systems in the daily workflow
- Same-day
- Job completion visibility
- 18%
- More jobs completed per crew per week
The telling moment was when the crews asked to keep a system we built. Adoption is normally the hard part. Here it was the thing that happened on its own.
— Director of Field Operations, Energy & utilities
Engagement models
Three ways to buy this, priced against what it removes
Assessment
Know which automations will pay before you commit build budget.
$18,000 – $45,000
Fixed fee, scoped to the number of functions in review.
Typical duration: 2–4 weeks
- Measured baseline for every process in scope — volume, touch count, cycle time, exception rate
- Fully loaded cost per transaction, reconciled against payroll and finance data
- Ranked candidate portfolio with a consistent economic model
- Value-versus-feasibility view across the business
- Investment, savings, payback and three-year ROI per shortlisted initiative
- +3 more deliverables
A costed, ranked roadmap you can execute with us or with any other supplier.
Build
Design, integrate and land automation in production.
$85,000 – $400,000
Milestone-based, priced against measured savings.
Typical duration: 6–20 weeks
- Process design, exception taxonomy and decision logic documented and tested
- Integration against ERP, CRM, ITSM and document stores
- Extraction and classification with confidence thresholds where input is unstructured
- Human review queue for exceptions with full source context
- Purpose-built internal application or agent interface where the process needs one
- +3 more deliverables
Working automation in production, documented and ready for your team to own.
Managed automation
We run it, report on it, and grow the coverage quarter by quarter.
From $2,500 / month
Scaled to process coverage, transaction volume and support hours.
Typical duration: 12-month initial term
- 24/7 monitoring with alerting on failure, drift and volume anomalies
- Failed-run replay and incident response against agreed response times
- Named support path with escalation and a quarterly service review
- Throughput, accuracy and cost-per-transaction reporting
- Continuous tuning of thresholds, rules and extraction quality
- +3 more deliverables
A running capability with a reported, compounding return and a support path you can hold us to.
Indicative ranges. Fixed pricing follows the assessment, when integration complexity and exception volume are known rather than assumed.
Before you ask
The questions that decide these projects
Still not answered?
Ask an engineer directly. No qualification script, no discovery call before you can ask a question.
Ask us directlyWe already tried automation and it did not stick. Why would this be different?
Will this replace our people?
How do you handle our data?
Do your AI components send our documents to a third party?
We have an internal engineering team. Can they do this instead?
What happens at the end of an engagement?
Bring us the process you already know is costing too much
Thirty minutes with an engineer is usually enough to tell whether it is worth automating, roughly what it would save, and whether the payback is inside a window your finance team will accept. If the answer is no, we will say so on the call.