Where they started
A building products distributor with three branches and a sales team of nine. Customers were builders and trades who ordered by email, phone and text, often as photos of handwritten lists. Sales reps keyed everything into the inventory system. Because the branch had no dedicated accounts payable staff, they also matched supplier invoices to purchase orders in the afternoons.
The general manager’s estimate was that the sales team spent half their time on admin. Nobody had checked whether supplier invoices matched agreed pricing in years.
What we found in the workshop
The half day workshop produced fourteen candidates. Two survived scoring by a wide margin. Order entry, because of the sheer volume of hours. Supplier invoice matching, because nobody was doing it properly and the business suspected it was leaking money.
Discovery confirmed both. It also found that customer orders, even the handwritten ones, mapped cleanly to the customer’s own order history. The same builders bought the same products. The product codes came from history with high confidence.
What we built
Two workflows in the inventory and accounting systems the business already ran.
The first reads inbound orders in whatever form they arrive and matches lines to the customer’s history and the product catalogue. It creates a draft sales order for the rep to confirm. The second reads supplier invoices and matches them to purchase orders and receipts line by line. It codes them and flags price and quantity variances before payment is approved.
Three things mattered.
- Customer history did most of the work. Matching a handwritten line to a product was far more reliable using what that customer had bought before than using the catalogue alone.
- Variances were shown to a person, with the reason. Price differences against the agreed supplier rate went to one person with the contract price beside them.
- The reps confirmed every order. Nothing shipped without the rep who owns the customer checking the draft.
Where it landed
Sales reps got about four hours a day back. Around eighty eight percent of supplier invoices now match and code without a person touching them. The variance queue caught roughly $140,000 in supplier overcharges in the first six months.
What we would do differently
The variance queue was initially owned by the branch managers, who were too busy to clear it. The month two fix, one person centrally, was the right design from the start.