← Case studies · AI audit · Manufacturing · 14 days
A storage-systems manufacturer losing $1,213,960 a year, found in 68 places
waste priced, per year
largest single leak
of busywork, every week
“I've got lists to keep track of my lists.”
A storage-systems manufacturer, and really four businesses stacked into one. They design self-storage buildings, make the parts in their own factory, roller doors, swing doors, lockers, latches and partitions, then buy in the steel and roofing, truck it all out and build it on site. So under one roof sits a sales and estimating shop, a factory, a procurement and logistics operation, and construction crews. Growing, mid-sized, and well past the point where everyone can just remember how things get done.
They ran on a big stack of separate tools. An ERP, a CRM, a project platform, a scheduler, estimating spreadsheets, CAD and a file store, and none of it talks. So people were the glue. Data got typed into one system, typed again into the next, then checked by hand to make sure it survived the trip. And leadership was nervous about AI for a fair reason. Staff had once handed a tool too much access and it nearly wiped things it should never have touched. The CEO's line the whole way through was human oversight, human oversight, human oversight.
Findings & waste analysis
Storage-systems manufacturer · audited June 2026
- Roughly 80% of the project team's time goes on repetitive admin and re-keying, not managing projects$416,000/yr
- Standard low-complexity items quoted and processed by hand instead of sold self-service online$150,000/yr
- Five office people keying and interpreting site data, ten hours a week each$130,000/yr
- No item-level data on $1.3M of annual roofing and rainwater spend, so no way to negotiate on it$65,000/yr
- The freight schedule manually rebuilt in a spreadsheet every single morning$31,200/yr
- Part-loads never consolidated, so three or four small trucks roll to the same site in the same week$30,000/yr
figures verbatim, in the client’s own rates · names removed
The finished audit surfaced 68 opportunity areas across the whole business, worth $1,213,960 a year and 150.6 hours a week. The biggest single leak was the project team: roughly 80% of its time went on repetitive admin and re-keying rather than managing projects. Standard low-complexity products were quoted and processed by hand when they could sell themselves online. And for every five people on site bringing data back, five office people sat keying and interpreting it. That was before the long tail, dozens more areas, each carrying its own hours and dollars.
Free 30 min · one process priced live, like the lines above
How it ran before
- Roughly 80% of the project team's time goes on repetitive admin and re-keying, not managing projects
- Standard low-complexity items quoted and processed by hand instead of sold self-service online
- Five office people keying and interpreting site data, ten hours a week each
The blueprint we handed over
- handed over starts with one idea: stop making people the glue.
- Connect the systems through one clean data layer so a job gets entered once, not three or four times, and flows from sales to build to invoice on its own.
- Then put narrow, staff-facing AI helpers on the repeat jobs: drafting proposals straight from estimates, flagging risky contract clauses before pricing, answering ERP questions from a knowledge base.
This audit's findings, laid out as the client received them, names removed. The full deliverable maps every process, prices every leak, and ends in a build plan in priority order.
Walk through a full sample audit →Kickoff
Team sessions, every handoff mapped
Every leak priced in their rates
Findings + blueprint, live
“I think realistically I get 20% project management out of the team. The rest, it's just admin, admin, admin.”
None of this was visible from the owner’s chair.
Found by mapping the operation person by person, and pricing what came up. Same method, your rates: 3× the fee in findings, or the audit is free.