04Automation Suite

A command center that orchestrates workflows across departments: approvals, documents and data moving without human friction.

Industry
Professional Services
Year
2024
Duration
12 weeks
Services
Business Automation · Custom Software Development · Cloud Solutions

-63%

Manual steps

Across the four highest-volume operational workflows.

4 days

Faster month-end

Close cycle reduced from nine working days to five.

100%

Audit coverage

Every action attributable, timestamped and exportable.

11→1

Systems to check

One operations view replacing eleven separate logins.

The Challenge

Four departments, eleven systems and a month-end close held together by spreadsheets and reminder emails. Nobody could say where an approval was without asking three people, and every audit turned into an archaeology project.

The Approach

Four moves that shaped the build, in the order they mattered.

  1. 01

    Shadow the real process

    Two weeks observing the workflow as performed, including every undocumented workaround, before proposing a single automation.

  2. 02

    Automate the highest-volume path

    The busiest approval chain went first, running in parallel with the manual process until it had earned trust.

  3. 03

    Design the exception queue

    Cases that do not fit route to a clean human queue with full context, never a silent failure or a confidently wrong result.

  4. 04

    Make everything observable

    Every job traced, every failure retried or surfaced, and a live operations view anyone in the business can read.

What shipped

  • Eleven systems integrated
  • Multi-step approvals with escalation
  • Document extraction with review queue
  • Complete audit trail
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Runbooks handed to the internal team

Built with

  • Next.js
  • Node.js
  • Temporal
  • PostgreSQL
  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Grafana

Every repository, cloud account and piece of documentation was handed over in the client's own organisation, with a walkthrough recording for the internal team.

Month-end used to consume the last week of every month. Now it is a Tuesday.

Finance Director/Professional Services Group
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