Anna Totterdell
Projects Director
This article is about a team. Not a system. Not a technology. A group of four people in an operations department who were spending more than half their working week on tasks that added no value - and what changed when those tasks went away.
The company is a mid-market distribution business. The team manages supplier relationships, purchasing, and stock replenishment. They are experienced, capable, and - until recently - exhausted.
What twenty hours a week looks like
Twenty hours sounds abstract until you break it down into the specific tasks that consume them.
Every morning, the purchasing coordinator opened three systems: the ERP for current stock levels, a supplier portal for lead times and pricing, and a shared spreadsheet that tracked purchase orders the ERP could not handle properly. She spent the first ninety minutes of every day cross-referencing these three sources to identify what needed reordering.
The spreadsheet existed because the ERP's reorder logic did not account for supplier-specific lead times or minimum order quantities. Someone had built the spreadsheet four years ago to fill the gap. It had grown to over sixty tabs and no one else in the team fully understood how it worked.
Once the reorder list was assembled, the purchasing coordinator emailed it to the operations manager for approval. The operations manager reviewed it against the budget tracker - a separate spreadsheet maintained by finance - and replied with amendments. On a good day, this took two hours. On a bad day, it required three rounds of email before the numbers agreed.
After approval, the purchase orders were entered manually into the ERP. The same data that had been extracted, cross-referenced, and approved was now typed back into the system it originally came from. This took another hour, and introduced errors roughly once a week - a wrong quantity, a transposed code, a missed line item.
Finally, when goods arrived, the warehouse team checked them against a printed copy of the purchase order. Discrepancies were flagged by email to the operations team, who investigated by - again - cross-referencing the ERP, the supplier portal, and the spreadsheet.
This cycle repeated every day. Five days a week. Four people touched it. And when you added up the time spent extracting data, cross-referencing, emailing for approval, re-entering, and investigating discrepancies, it came to just over twenty hours per week.
What the team actually wanted to be doing
This is the part that rarely gets discussed in articles about automation. The time was not just lost. It was taken from somewhere.
The purchasing coordinator had ten years of supplier knowledge. She knew which suppliers were reliable, which ones inflated lead times, and which ones would negotiate on volume. But she spent her mornings copying numbers between systems instead of managing those relationships.
The operations manager had a clear view of which product lines were underperforming and where the margins were being eroded. But he spent his afternoons reviewing and amending purchase orders instead of acting on those insights.
The team had the experience and the judgement to improve the operation. They did not have the time, because the manual work consumed it.
What changed
The fix was not complicated. It was specific.
The reorder logic was rebuilt to account for supplier lead times and minimum order quantities - the gap the spreadsheet had been filling for four years. The spreadsheet was retired.
The ERP, the supplier portal, and the budget tracker were connected through data and systems integration. Stock levels, lead times, pricing, and budget availability are now visible in one place, updated in real time. The morning cross-referencing ritual is gone.
Purchase order approval was moved from email into a business automation workflow with automated routing, budget checks, and escalation rules. The operations manager reviews a pre-validated order list once a day, approves or amends with a single action, and moves on. The three rounds of email are gone.
Approved purchase orders are generated automatically in the ERP. No re-entry. No transposed codes. No missed line items.
Goods receipt is checked against the live purchase order data in the system. Discrepancies are flagged immediately with the specific detail of what does not match, rather than triggering an email chain that takes half a day to resolve.
What the team does now
The purchasing coordinator spends her mornings on supplier management. She has renegotiated terms with two key suppliers, consolidated three underperforming product lines, and identified a lead time issue that was costing the business an estimated £40,000 a year in expedited shipping - an issue she had suspected for months but never had time to investigate.
The operations manager now produces a weekly margin analysis that the commercial team uses to adjust pricing. Before, this analysis existed as an idea he had never been able to action because his time was consumed by purchase order review.
The two support staff who spent most of their time on data entry and discrepancy investigation now handle exception management and reporting - work that requires judgement rather than repetition.
The team did not get smaller. Nobody was replaced. The same four people do the same jobs. They just do the parts of those jobs that actually require human skill, instead of the parts that required a human only because the systems were not connected.
The numbers
Weekly hours spent on manual purchasing tasks: reduced from 22 to 4.
Purchase order errors per month: reduced from 4–5 to near zero.
Average approval cycle time: reduced from 6 hours to 40 minutes.
Supplier term renegotiations completed in first quarter: 2 (previously deferred for over a year).
Identified cost saving from lead time analysis: approximately £40,000 annually.
Why this matters
This is not a story about technology. It is a story about capacity.
Every business has teams like this one - experienced people spending their days on work that could be automated, while the higher-value work they are uniquely qualified to do goes undone.
The manual tasks are not trivial. They are real and necessary. But they are not the best use of a person who has ten years of supplier knowledge, or a manager who can spot margin erosion in the data. Those skills are wasted on data entry and email chains.
The question is not whether your team is working hard. They almost certainly are. The question is whether IT and process strategy is pointing them at the right things - or whether the systems are forcing them to spend their time on tasks that should not require a human at all.
