How to save 4.2 hours a week on one process
In March 2024, we entered a print shop near Krakow that employs 14 people. The owner, Mr. Tomasz, admitted that his team spends every Monday manually rewriting data from emails into sheets. We counted it with a stopwatch: one person wasted 252 minutes a week sending simple order confirmations.
Where was the money leaking?
At Filary Biznesu Consulting, we profess the principle: facts on the table. In this specific print shop, the process looked like this: the client sent an inquiry, the office employee opened the PDF, copied the data to Excel, and then manually entered the order number into the accounting system. Each such operation took an average of 2 minutes and 45 seconds. With 92 orders a week, it gave over 4 hours of pure waste. The employee was not earning for the company then, but acting as a human cable for data transmission.
The problem was not only about time. People make mistakes, especially when doing something boring for three hours without a break. Error analysis from the period from January to February 2024 showed that every 23rd order had a typo in the address or a wrong Tax ID. Each such mistake generated costs of corrections and re-shipment by courier for 18.90 PLN. In summary, the company lost 417 PLN per month on this, not counting the irritation of clients waiting for correct documents.
Automation is not magic, it's math. If a process takes 3 minutes and you repeat it 100 times, you lose 5 hours.
Implementing a simple solution
Instead of persuading Mr. Tomasz to buy a huge ERP system for 47,300 PLN, we proposed simple scripts integrating the existing mailbox with the database. We used tools that the company already had, but could not squeeze the maximum out of. We count every minute, so we divided the work into three stages. The first of them, mapping data fields, we did in 3 business days. There was no fluff – we simply extracted a scheme of all 12 types of orders that hit the office.
The next step was to create an automation that recognizes attachments and independently generates a confirmation in PDF format. The system started working on April 14, 2024. For the first 48 hours, Marek Zieliński personally supervised every dispatch to make sure the algorithm didn't mix up gross and net. It turned out that the script handles 96.4% of inquiries without any human help. The remaining 3.6% are handwritten messages or those with wrong attachments, which the system immediately passes for manual verification.
Effects after 6 months
Data from September 2024 are clear. The time spent handling confirmations fell from 252 minutes to just 19 minutes a week. These few dozen minutes are the time in which the office worker looks at the summary report and approves the shipping list. Ms. Anna, the office employee, spent the regained 3.8 hours on active contact with customers who had not completed their purchases. Thanks to this, the print shop recorded a sales increase of 2.3% on a monthly scale without hiring new people.
To be honest, we didn't expect such a small change to affect the team atmosphere. Ms. Anna stopped feeling frustration because of 'typing data'. At Filary Biznesu Consulting, we know that a tired employee is an expensive employee. Removing the most monotonous task meant that turnover in the office fell to zero – since the implementation, no one has left the job. That's a saving of 12,400 PLN, which the company would have to spend on recruitment and onboarding a new team member.
We regained 4 hours of work, but in reality we gained an additional salesperson for the price of one script.
How to start at your place?
If in your company someone daily rewrites the same data from one window to another, it's a sign that you are burning money in the furnace. You don't have to buy space technology right away. Start with an audit of one, simplest process. Measure the time with a stopwatch for 5 days in a row. If the average comes out above 15 minutes a day for one activity, then automation will pay for itself in less than 3 months. This is pure calculation that we do for our clients every day.
Heads-up: automation will not fix a mess. If your data in Excel is unreadable, and emails land in five different folders, first we have to clean up. At Filary Biznesu Consulting, we first arrange the blocks, and then we teach them how to arrange themselves. Only such an approach guarantees that you will recover those 14% margins we write about on the home page. By the way, most companies have these tools at hand, they just don't know it.
