Automation
The most expensive process in your business is probably invisible
It rarely appears on a budget line. It looks like someone exporting a CSV every Monday, someone re-keying orders from an inbox into the ERP, someone reconciling two systems that should already agree, someone chasing an approval through email because there is no workflow.
Individually each of these takes twenty minutes. Collectively, across a year, they consume a salary — and unlike a salary they generate errors, because manual data entry has a defect rate and every rekeyed field is a chance to transpose a number.
Automation and integration work removes that. Systems exchange data directly, approvals route themselves, documents generate from source data rather than from a template someone edits, and exceptions surface as alerts rather than as a discovery three weeks later.
Our advantage here is that we come from an enterprise integration background. Connecting two SaaS tools is straightforward. Connecting SAP to a warehouse system to an e-commerce platform, with proper error handling and a reconciliation you can audit, is a different discipline — and it is the one we practise daily.
What we offer
The work, specifically
Five kinds of work, usually beginning with an audit that tells you where the money actually is.
Process audit and automation roadmap
A structured review of where manual effort actually goes, measured rather than estimated. You get a ranked list of candidate processes with the time cost, the error rate, the automation effort and the estimated payback period for each — including an explicit list of the ones we recommend leaving alone.
System and API integration
Direct connections between the platforms you run — ERP, CRM, warehouse and inventory, accounting, e-commerce, payroll, field service. Built on APIs, message queues or scheduled file exchange depending on what each system genuinely supports, with schema validation and structured error handling rather than a script that fails silently.
Workflow and approval automation
Multi-step business processes that route themselves: purchase approvals, onboarding, leave and expense, quality sign-offs, compliance checks. With escalation rules for when someone sits on an approval, full audit trails, and notifications in the tools your team already has open.
Document and reporting automation
Quotes, invoices, purchase orders, compliance certificates and operational reports generated from source data on a schedule or a trigger, delivered where they need to go. Removes both the manual assembly and the version-control problem that comes with template files living on a shared drive.
Robotic process automation
For legacy systems that expose no API at all, software robots that drive the interface the way a person would. We treat this as the pragmatic fallback rather than the default, and we are direct about its fragility — but for a system nobody will ever modernise, it is frequently the only economic answer.
Data synchronisation and reconciliation
Keeping the same record consistent across multiple systems, with conflict resolution rules you have agreed rather than last-write-wins, plus automated reconciliation reporting so a divergence is caught the day it happens instead of at month-end.
Deliverables
What you actually receive
Automation work is judged on what happens when it fails, not when it works. These deliverables exist for the failure case.
| Deliverable | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Process map, current and future | How the process runs today with measured time and error cost, and how it will run afterwards, including which exceptions still require a human. |
| Integration specification | Every data field mapped between systems, transformation rules, trigger conditions, and the agreed behaviour for each identified failure mode. |
| Built and tested integration | Deployed in your environment, tested against real data volumes rather than sample records, with a documented rollback position. |
| Monitoring and alerting | A dashboard showing throughput and error rates, with alerts routed to a named owner. You find out about failures from the system, not from a customer. |
| Reprocessing procedure | A documented, tested method for your team to re-run failed transactions without calling us. This is what stops a support dependency forming. |
| Benefit measurement | Before and after figures on the metric we agreed at scoping — hours removed, error rate, cycle time — so the investment can be evaluated honestly. |
Stack
What we build with
Chosen per problem. We are not resellers and we have no incentive to put you on a platform with a licence attached.
- SAP AIF
- SAP PI / PO
- SAP Integration Suite
- Azure Logic Apps
- Azure Service Bus
- AWS Lambda
- REST / SOAP APIs
- Webhooks
- n8n
- Power Automate
- Python
- Node.js
- SFTP / EDI
- Kafka
Why it matters
Automation pays back every month, forever
The cost is one-off; the saving is not. A process that consumes ten hours a week costs roughly five hundred hours a year, every year, indefinitely. Automating it is a single project cost against a recurring saving, which is why integration work typically reaches payback inside eighteen months and then simply keeps returning.
Errors cost more than the labour. Manual data entry has a measurable defect rate. Each error generates rework, and some generate a customer problem, a compliance issue or a payment made twice. Removing the manual step removes the error class entirely rather than reducing its frequency.
It removes key-person risk. When a process only works because one person knows the workarounds, that person cannot take leave without something degrading. Encoding the process in a system documents it as a side effect, which is worth more than most businesses account for.
Questions
Automation & Integration, answered
How do we know which processes are worth automating?
Look for volume, repetition and a defined rule set. A task done fifty times a week following consistent logic is a strong candidate; a task done twice a month requiring judgement usually is not. We run a short process audit that measures actual time cost against automation effort, and we tell you which items are not worth doing — that list is often as valuable as the one that is.
What is the difference between integration and RPA?
Integration connects systems at the data layer through APIs, message queues or file exchange — it is robust, fast and largely invisible. RPA drives the user interface the way a person would, clicking and typing. Integration is almost always better where an API exists. RPA is the pragmatic answer for legacy systems that expose no interface at all, but it is more fragile because a screen layout change can break it. We default to integration and use RPA where there is genuinely no alternative.
Will automation put our staff out of work?
In practice, almost never in the businesses we work with. What it removes is the re-keying, the copy-paste between systems and the reconciliation, which is the part of the job people describe as soul-destroying. The capacity gets redirected to work that requires judgement. It is worth being honest with your team about this early rather than letting them guess.
How long before an automation project pays for itself?
Most of the integration work we do reaches payback in six to eighteen months on labour cost alone, before counting the error reduction. We calculate the estimate during scoping using your actual volumes and salary costs, and we show you the working so you can challenge the assumptions.
What happens when a connected system gets upgraded?
This is exactly why error handling and monitoring matter more than the happy path. We build integrations with schema validation, alerting and a documented reprocessing procedure, so a breaking change surfaces immediately rather than silently corrupting data for a fortnight. Ongoing support agreements cover keeping integrations current as connected systems change.
Next step
What does your team do every week that a system should be doing?
Bring us the process everyone complains about. We will estimate the time it costs, what it would take to remove it, and whether the numbers justify the work.