✓What You'll Learn
A 600-person professional services firm was spending 1,247 hours per month on manual tasks. Our 90-day automation programme recovered 85% of those hours and reduced operational cost by 31%.
When a professional services firm with 600 employees came to Diztaly complaining that their operations team was overwhelmed and headcount was growing faster than revenue, our diagnostic revealed the real problem within a week: their operations team was spending 1,200+ hours per month on manual, automatable tasks. What followed was a 90-day automation programme that recovered those hours, reduced their operational cost by 31%, and allowed them to grow revenue by 40% without adding a single operations hire.
The Client Situation
Our client was a management consulting firm that had grown from 200 to 600 employees in three years. Their back-office processes had not kept pace with their growth — they were still using manual, email-based workflows designed for a 200-person firm to manage the demands of a 600-person organisation. The symptoms were obvious: invoicing was consistently 10–15 days late; new employee onboarding was taking three weeks and still producing errors; approval workflows were backed up, creating delays across the business; and the operations team was working 55-hour weeks to keep up with demand.
The Diagnostic: Finding the 1,200 Hours
We began with a workflow audit — structured interviews with every operations team member mapping every process they executed, the steps involved, and the time spent. The audit produced a priority list of twelve processes that, together, consumed 1,247 hours of manual labour per month. Broken down, the top five highest-labour processes were: invoice generation and delivery (280 hours/month), new employee onboarding coordination (220 hours/month), client reporting compilation and distribution (190 hours/month), contract routing and approval (170 hours/month), and expense report processing and reconciliation (140 hours/month).
Phase 1: Quick Wins (Days 1–30)
We prioritised the three highest-volume, lowest-complexity automations first, following the principle of building early wins to fund and justify subsequent investment. Invoice automation was implemented in week one using a Xero + Zapier workflow: when a project was marked complete in their project management tool, the system automatically generated the invoice in Xero with correct client details and billing codes, sent it to the client, and created a follow-up reminder if unpaid after 14 days. Time saved: 240 of the 280 monthly hours previously spent on manual invoicing. Expense report processing was automated in week two using Expensify, reducing manual reconciliation from 140 hours to 12 hours per month. Client reporting was automated in week three using a Looker + Google Sheets + email automation, reducing manual compilation from 190 hours to 20 hours per month.
Phase 2: Complex Workflows (Days 31–75)
The more complex automations — onboarding and contract routing — required more careful design. Employee onboarding was rebuilt as a multi-step workflow in Workato, automatically provisioning system access, sending equipment requests to the facilities team, scheduling onboarding meetings with HR and the team lead, and distributing the onboarding checklist — triggered the moment an offer was accepted in the ATS. Contract routing was redesigned in DocuSign + Salesforce, with automatic routing rules based on contract value and type, SLA-based escalation, and automatic CRM record update upon signature.
The Results
| Metric | Before | After (90 days) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual operations hours/month | 1,247 | 187 | -85% |
| Operations team headcount | 8 | 8 | 0 additional hires |
| Revenue supported by same ops team | £12M annual | £16.8M annual | +40% |
| Invoicing cycle time | 10–15 days late | Same-day delivery | Eliminated lag |
| Onboarding time | 3 weeks | 5 days | -76% |
| Operations cost as % of revenue | 7.2% | 4.9% | -31% |