One workflow, seen as it really happens.
The Audit
Five days embedded with the sales office. 6 people interviewed, 5 systems traced, 9 workflows documented, 1 chosen for value. Every exception categorised, every hour counted.
Holds the official price file; roughly 40% of quoted prices are overridden in Excel before they go out.
Price overrides, the quote log, the credit watchlist and the margin sheet. Four workbooks, one owner each.
No tracking, no ownership flags. A request is “in progress” when someone remembers it.
Discounts over 5% get agreed here. No record ends up anywhere else.
Checked manually each morning before big orders are released. Stale by mid-morning.
The Findings
The sales office's reality, organised so you can absorb it in two minutes.
74% of the sales office’s week goes to work an agent can carry. 14% needs human judgment. 12% is the selling these four people were hired to do.
| Type | Freq/mo | Resolution | Repeatable | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price override needed | 46 | 3.1 hrs | YES | |
| Stock level mismatch | 38 | 1.4 hrs | YES | |
| Delivery date conflict | 29 | 2.2 hrs | YES | |
| Part-load pricing | 24 | 1.8 hrs | YES | |
| Credit hold question | 17 | 4.6 hrs | NO | |
| Spec substitution | 14 | 2.9 hrs | YES | |
| Duplicate purchase order | 9 | 0.8 hrs | YES | |
| Missing site address | 8 | 1.1 hrs | YES |
Which customers get which price sits in Ryan's overrides workbook and Ryan's memory. When he is off, quoting slows to a crawl. No backup, no documentation.
Anything over 5% is a message thread. Nobody can say who approved what, when, or against which job. The first person to ask will be an auditor.
Supplier increases land mid-quarter; the Excel price file catches up weeks later. Quotes go out on old costs and the margin quietly erodes.
Roughly 1 in 5 quotes gets a follow-up. The rest sit in the shared inbox. Nobody owns the chase, so the chase does not happen.
Two people can price a full trade quote. Both were on site visits twice during the audit week; the queue stopped both times.
Measured across the audit week from the quote log, the shared inbox, and 40 sampled quotes. Agreed with the Managing Director on day 5, before anything gets built.
The Plan
What we do about it, in the 30 days that follow the audit week. One workflow, one embedded builder, numbers against the day-5 baseline.
- High volume: around 120 quote requests a month, every one touched by hand
- Repeatable: 78% of exceptions follow a pattern an agent can carry
- Expensive: 31 hours a week, plus the margin leaking through stale prices
- Measurable: turnaround, error rate and follow-up rate are all countable from day 1
This deliverable: the operating map, the exception patterns, the risk register, the baseline.
The quoting agent, wired into Sage, the shared inbox and the price rules, run against real requests with the estimators watching.
An eval suite from 20 real quotes with hand-checked ideal outcomes. Pass rate, failure categories and cost per quote, measured.
Live on real requests with the approval gate in place. The team trained to run, read and extend it. The before-and-after against day 5.
Redeployment, not redundancy: the estimators stop re-keying and start selling. Every follow-up happens because an agent owns the chase. Figures are illustrative for this simulation; yours come from your own day-5 baseline.
Five days embedded, one deliverable like this one for your workflow. Scoped and quoted up front.
An hour with each person who runs the workflow, read access to the systems it touches, and a decision-maker who can say yes within a day.
A production agent with guardrails, an eval suite, a trained team, and the before-and-after numbers in front of your leadership.