Case Study: 10-Hour Automation That Freed Up 20% of Work Time

How a focused, low-risk automation delivered recurring capacity in days, not months

Ten hours of focused automation work unlocked a recurring 20 percent reduction in team time spent on routine tasks. This is a short, practical case study of how a small professional services firm turned a single repetitive workflow into an ongoing productivity gain.

Situation

The client was a mid-sized professional services firm with about 12 staff. A set of recurring administrative tasks consumed a disproportionate share of non-billable time. Tasks included intake form processing, client follow-up emails, calendar coordination, and data entry into the CRM and billing system. Before the project, one part-time office manager and two associates spent roughly 15 hours a week combined on those tasks. That created slow response times, missed updates, and limited capacity to take on new work.

Goal

Reduce manual work on these recurring tasks, improve accuracy, and free up capacity for higher-value client work. The target was modest. We aimed to free up roughly 20 percent of the team’s weekly administrative effort without introducing heavy governance or a multi-month rollout.

Action taken

We followed a 5-step, tightly scoped approach and completed the build in about 10 hours of focused development and testing.

Process mapping. We documented the intake-to-billing workflow in one hour, identifying the exact handoffs, inputs, and decision points.
Select tooling. We used one low-code integration platform for orchestrations, simple serverless functions for data transformation, and a lightweight LLM-based assistant for drafting client messages.
Build the automation. Over six hours we built a webhook, a data-cleaning function, a rules engine for review decisions, an auto-draft email generator, and a sync to the CRM and billing system.
Human-in-loop and testing. Two hours were spent testing edge cases, adding guardrails, and setting up a single-click approval step for the office manager.
Monitor and iterate. We implemented simple logs and a weekly report to monitor errors for the first 30 days.

Result

After deployment the firm reported these measurable outcomes within the first month:

20 percent reduction in time spent on the targeted administrative workflow. Time dropped from 15 hours a week to 12 hours a week for those tasks.
Faster client response times. Initial client messages were sent within one business day instead of two to three days.
Fewer manual entry errors. Data normalization cut CRM and billing mismatches by roughly 60 percent on the tasks covered.
High user satisfaction. The office manager could focus on coordination and process improvement.

Mini-workflow to replicate this result

Pick one recurring process that costs 8–20 hours per week across your team.
Map the exact inputs, decision points, and exceptions. Keep it to one page.
Identify rule-based steps that can be automated and places you need human validation.
Choose tools that already integrate with your systems, favor low-code for speed.
Build a minimum viable automation with a human approval gate.
Test 20 representative samples. Add guardrails for edge cases.
Deploy with logging and set a 30-day review to tune the rules.

Lessons learned and tradeoffs

Start small. Large projects often stall. Pick a single workflow where rules are clear.
Keep humans in the loop early. Automations should accelerate work, not replace judgment where risk is nontrivial.
Monitor for drift. Forms or software updates can break rules, so add simple alerts.
Plan maintenance. A small maintenance budget keeps the automation reliable and preserves the ROI.
Watch for unintended effects. Faster responses may increase inbound follow-ups, requiring a second small automation for scheduling.

Final note. This case study is anonymized, but the pattern is common. A short, focused investment in automation often creates persistent capacity gains, especially for small teams. The key is selecting the right process and designing safe, auditable automations.

Want the one-page process map template we used to scope this project? Book a short consult and I will send the template and a 30-minute checklist review.