73% faster order processing for a 60-person precision parts manufacturer.

A 60-employee precision parts manufacturer in the US Midwest, family-owned and operating for over thirty years. They supply machined components to industrial equipment makers across automotive, aerospace, and energy. Revenue had grown steadily, but headcount in the back office had grown faster — and margin was starting to feel it.

Their order intake process was almost entirely manual. Customer purchase orders arrived as PDF attachments and EDI files in inconsistent formats. Three people spent the better part of two days each week re-keying line items across four disconnected systems: the email inbox, the ERP, a quoting tool, and a shipping spreadsheet.

The cost wasn't just the salary. It was the typos. Wrong quantities, wrong part numbers, missed delivery dates — small errors that cascaded into late shipments, expedited freight, and unhappy customers. The owner knew the process needed to change, but every consultant who'd come through the door had pitched a twelve-month ERP replacement they couldn't afford and didn't trust.

We started with a 45-minute audit. Within a week we had a working demo running on their actual purchase order emails from the past 30 days. No slide deck. The real thing.

The production build wrapped four pieces of automation around their existing ERP — no replacement required. Inbound supplier and customer emails are parsed automatically, line items extracted and validated against their part catalog, orders created in the ERP, and exceptions routed to a human queue with the ambiguous fields highlighted. POs to suppliers are generated and sent the same way, with templated approval flows for anything above a configurable threshold.

Their team didn't need to learn a new system. The work just stopped showing up in their inbox.

Order processing time dropped 73%. The 40 hours per week previously spent on manual entry effectively disappeared — the work now runs overnight. Two of the three people on order intake were redeployed onto customer-facing roles the owner had wanted to fund for years but couldn't justify.

Entry errors fell to near zero, which removed the downstream cost of expedited freight and rework. The owner's words after month one: "It feels like we hired three people without paying for them."