Where is the expensive manual work?
Every operation has a process where people walk the gap between two systems by hand. I find that manual work, work out with you what it costs, and automate it. Using AI where AI genuinely helps, and nowhere else.
One thirty-second form. No sales call.
01 The problem
Systems do not talk to each other, so people do the manual work
Your ERP, your WMS, your mailbox, the spreadsheets that grew up around them. They all do their job, but they do not talk to each other. At every point where that gap sits, there is a person closing it by hand: retyping, looking up, checking, forwarding, reporting back.
That work appears in no process description and in no KPI. Nobody measures it. And it is almost always the most expensive part of the day, because it happens again every day and because errors creep in that only cost money later.
You probably already know which process I mean. Most operations managers name it within thirty seconds.
02 Who this is for
Is this you?
Probably not if the work arrives mostly by phone and there is nothing digital to start from, if every job has a completely different shape, or if you are looking for a platform to run yourself. I do not sell software.
03 How it works
Automating order processing, from email to approval
This is the process I come across most often in wholesale and distribution, and the first one I built out completely. An order email arrives. Someone on the inside sales desk reads it, looks up the customer, finds the article numbers, checks stock, checks the pricing agreement, retypes all of it into the ERP and writes a confirmation back. Five to eight minutes per order. At sixty orders a day that is roughly six hours of manual work, every single day.
That is what realistically comes off a process like this. Not eliminated. Faster, reviewed, by someone who is no longer typing but judging.
Step by step, it looks like this:
The email arrives
Hi,
Please send 250x bolt M8x40 galvanised. And 2 boxes of those washers we had last time.
This one can go to the Tilburg branch.
Regards, Jeroen
Everything gets checked
- Customer recognisedVan Loon Metaal B.V., account 1042
- Article 1 foundBM-0840-VZ, 250 units, in stock
- Article 2 is unclear“those washers we had last time” matches the order history: washer M8 stainless. Flagged for review.
- Pricing appliedCustomer tier 2, as agreed
- Delivery address differsTilburg instead of the default address. Flagged for review.
- Credit checkedNo hold
It is staged for approval
2 points flagged for the sales desk. Nothing moves until someone has looked at them.
The two uncertain items get flagged rather than guessed. That is exactly the work where a person adds value, and the rest is typing nobody needs to do.
Example using invented company data.
This workflow runs, end to end. Right now it runs on an invented wholesaler with invented data, because I do not yet have a client whose order email I am allowed to show in public. I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
This is one example on invented data. In twenty minutes I will run it live on a real order email of yours, and you will see exactly what comes out. That convinces more than anything written here.
Show me04 How I build
It checks and stages. It writes nothing away unless a person looks.
Everything I build stages work for a human to approve. Nothing enters your ERP, your WMS or your records without someone clicking on it first.
That is why it works with the systems you already run, why I need no write access or integration from your IT team, and why the risk at the start is small enough to simply begin. Writing directly is possible later, if you want it and once the staged version has proven itself in practice. Not on day one.
05 Honestly
What I do not promise
- Not 95 percent automation. A person reviews it. That is not a shortcoming, that is the design.
- Not 99 percent accuracy as a number on a website. I can only say that once it runs at your place and we have measured it together.
- Not “error free”. Exceptions exist. The difference is that they get flagged instead of slipping through.
- No applications I have not built yet. If I am doing something for the first time you hear it up front and you see it in the price.
You have seen numbers like that before, and they probably disappointed. I would rather hold to a figure I can defend.
06 Where else it sits
The same approach, a different point in the process
The order desk is one place. In the audit I look at everything that comes back daily, is done by hand, and involves someone moving data from one place to another.
Reading documents
Invoices, order confirmations, packing slips, specifications. Anywhere a person copies figures out of a document into a system. This is the same technique as step 1 above, pointed at a different kind of document.
And beyond that: whatever the audit turns up
I am not going to list applications here that I have not built. What comes out of the audit and what I can build well, I build. What is better done by someone else or by an existing package, I will say so.
07 The audit
One hour, and you know what the manual work costs
Before anything gets built, it has to be clear what should be built. That is not a demo from me. It is an hour in which you describe how the work actually moves, and I keep asking. No slides, no pitch.
I start at the moment work arrives and follow it until it is done:
- Where it lands: email, customer portal, phone, or another system
- Who touches it, and in what order
- What gets looked up, checked and retyped along the way
- What goes wrong, how often, and what it costs to put right
At the end of that hour I do the arithmetic out loud on what this costs per day and per year. Then I ask whether that number sounds right to you. From that moment it is your number, not mine. That is the difference between a figure from a sales pitch and a figure you can repeat internally.
The twenty minutes beforehand costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. What the audit itself costs, you hear before we schedule it.
About your data: I ask for anonymised samples as standard, because I need the structure and not your customers' names. If I record the conversation I ask permission first, and the recording is deleted once the analysis is done.
08 The outcome
A plan you can retell yourself
A few days later I come back with what I found. Live, because a document in your mailbox gets read alone and judged alone. Six parts:
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1
What you told me
Your process, in your own words. So you can see I listened rather than filled in something standard.
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2
What it costs
The sum we did together. Calculated conservatively, with nothing in it you have not confirmed yourself.
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3
What I would do first
One thing. Narrow and concrete, not a list of ten improvements that nobody ever starts.
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4
What it looks like after
The same sum with the gain worked in. No promise the work disappears, but a realistic figure for what comes off.
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5
What it takes
Scope, timeline, and what I need from your side in time and access.
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6
What doing nothing costs
The same bill again next year, plus the volume growth you can already see coming.
If the honest answer is that there is not much to gain, you will hear that. Then you have spent an hour and you know where you stand.
Sixty order emails a day at six minutes each is roughly €4,500 a month in labour going into retyping. Every month it stays as it is, you pay that again. One hour is enough to know what the real figure is at your place.
Work it out with me09 What happens next
Work it out, build it, keep it running
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The audit
One hour, plus the write-up I come and present live. Everything starts here, and it is the only thing you need to say yes to right now.
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The build
Fixed price, scope agreed up front, no hourly billing. Nothing gets built before you have said yes. I do not deliver and disappear: it runs on your own data and your people know how it works before I leave.
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Keeping it running
Monthly, and optional. I watch the workflows and fix what breaks, for example when a supplier changes their file format. Automation left without maintenance stops working within six months. That happens more often than people think.
10 Who I am
One engineer, not an agency
Remco
Founder, Agentium
Engineer, with a background in operations and supply chain. I have seen enough processes work and break from the inside to know where it actually goes wrong: rarely in the system, almost always at the point where a person walks the gap between two systems by hand.
I am an engineer first and a builder second. Most of the value is not in the building, it is in working out properly what should be built. That is why everything here starts with an hour of listening rather than a demo.
Agentium is one person. I do the analysis, I build it, and I keep it running. There is no account manager in between and you will not be handed a junior. It also means I cannot scale endlessly, so I take on what I can do properly.
I am not selling you AI. I know your work, and I use AI where it happens to be the right tool for that work.
11 Contact
Where would you start?
Tell me briefly where the manual work sits at your place. I read every message myself and reply within one working day. Because Agentium is one person I can only take on a limited number of projects at a time, so if this is live for you, now beats next quarter.
Prefer plain email? remco@agentium.nl