- Problem
- A regional industrial components and MRO distributor (~$28M EBITDA, ~180 employees) ran order-to-cash through a central ERP. Inside sales and customer service spent a large share of capacity on repeat orders, manual price lookup, and order entry while complex quotes sat in the same queue. Leadership wanted a fact-based view of automatable volume vs. judgment work before committing capital to an operating-model rebuild.
- Action
- Ran proprietary process mining software alongside structured interviews with inside sales, customer service, and finance leadership to reconstruct full order-to-cash workflows with time allocation by function and order type. Established time-in-motion baselines and mapped where labor, rework, and margin leakage accumulated across the ERP and adjacent tooling. Identified inefficiencies and quantified loss drivers on repeat orders, manual price lookup, and order entry relative to complex quote and key-account work. Segmented volume into automation tiers and sized EBITDA impact from intake and lookup automation on transactional volume. Produced a 90-day implementation sequence aligned to inside-sales cadence, explicitly reserving key-account and complex quoting for existing staff while defining how automated intake, guardrails, and Teams-based approval would handle the long tail.
- Result
- Delivered process-mining-backed workflow maps with automation tiers, repeat-transaction volume quantification, and documented inefficiency and loss drivers across order-to-cash. Produced a phased business case sized to admin-hour savings and recoverable margin that did not depend on headcount reduction to pencil. Recommended a pilot architecture built on durable agent orchestration with guardrails, human-in-the-loop checkpoints via Microsoft Teams bots, and escalation handling for key-account and complex quote paths. Gave management a prioritized repeat-order intake pilot and a broader ERP-adjacent rollout sequence, providing enough specificity to commit budget without commissioning a second discovery pass.