The retype
Data leaves one system as a PDF and enters the next through a keyboard. A person reads, types, and checks. Every keystroke is a chance to be wrong, and the error surfaces weeks later, on an invoice.
Process automation
Somewhere in your company, a person is the integration.
Every week somebody exports a report, pastes it into a spreadsheet, fixes it by hand, and emails it onward. The business runs on that email. Nobody planned it that way.
That person cannot take a vacation. When they are out, the numbers are late, and everything downstream of the numbers is late with them. We find that work and replace it with software. The person gets their judgment back. The company gets a process that runs on Tuesday whether anyone is at the desk or not.
The shape of the problem
You will recognize this work. It hides in plain sight.
It never appears on an org chart. It shows up as a person being careful.
The reconciliation
Two systems hold the same facts and disagree. Once a month somebody lines them up in a spreadsheet, row by row, and decides which system is lying. The spreadsheet has rules, and the rules live in one person's head.
The relay
A request moves through the company as a forwarded email. Its status lives in an inbox. When the owner of that inbox is out sick, the request does not slow down. It stops.
The method
Watch first. Automate second.
Automation fails when it starts with a tool. It works when it starts with a person's Tuesday.
- Watch the work before writing anything. We sit with the person who does the job and watch a full cycle. The spreadsheet has rules nobody wrote down: the row that always gets deleted, the vendor whose name has to be corrected, the total that gets a second look. Those rules are the real specification, and today they exist only in that person's hands.
- Automate the boring part. Most of the job is mechanical. Export, match, transform, send. Software does the mechanical part on schedule, the same way every time, and it does not call in sick. That part goes first because it pays back first.
- Leave a human in the loop where judgment lives. Some rows need a decision, not a rule. The system queues them, shows what it knows, and waits for a person. The person spends their time on the decision instead of the hunt, and every decision is recorded.
- Make exceptions loud, never silent. The worst automation failure is quiet: everything looks fine while the numbers drift. When something does not match, the system says so, to a named person, in a channel they already read. An exception you can see is a task. An exception you cannot see is a liability.
An honest warning
Automating a bad process makes you wrong faster.
Software executes a process. It does not improve one. If the report is built on a number nobody trusts, automation will deliver the untrusted number sooner, with more confidence and less scrutiny. That is worse than the spreadsheet.
Before we automate a step, we ask whether the step should exist. Some steps get automated. Some get redesigned. Some get deleted, and deleting a step is the cheapest automation there is.
If we look at your process and the honest answer is that you need fewer steps rather than more software, that is what we will tell you. It is a shorter engagement. It is also the right one.
The deliverable
What you keep after we leave.
The software
A .NET service that runs on a schedule or on an event, with its state in Azure SQL. Not a macro taped to a workbook.
The source
The code, the pipeline that deploys it, and the Azure DevOps board that records every task and every decision. Progress is something you read off the board, not something you wait for in a status call.
The paper trail
Every run is logged. Every exception records what happened, who resolved it, and how. When someone asks why a number is what it is, the answer is on file, not in somebody's memory.
Start here
Tell us about the spreadsheet.
Describe the job in a paragraph: what gets exported, who fixes it, where it goes. We will tell you honestly whether it is worth automating, and what we would watch first.