Case study · Project Keel
Over two working weeks a month went into paperwork, not the work.
A UK service provider agency that connects the right specialists with the clients who need them. Three coordinators handle around 150 orders a month, and until recently everything ran through Excel and emails written from scratch. The client stays private, so we call this one Project Keel. This is what Objevo found, and what is changing now.
Where the time went
Objevo followed a single order from start to finish to see where the time goes. The details are typed into Excel first, then the coordinator looks for the right specialist by call, text or email. Once someone accepts, there is a handover email written from scratch, followed by a confirmation to the client, also written from scratch. An easy order takes about 20 minutes; when the provider is new, it climbs past 45, spread across a day of emails.
At 150 orders a month, the order side alone adds up to 45 to 110 hours. A second coordinator spends another 40-plus hours a month building invoice emails and account statements by hand, copying data from the inbox and the spreadsheet. The demand kept coming, but the hours ran out, so the agency stopped growing at around 150 orders. Not because the team was slow, but because their way of working never grew with them.
What Objevo did
The tempting shortcut would have been a chatbot dropped on top, but that would not have touched the real problem. Across three workshops, Objevo mapped every task from the first order to the final invoice and timed each step. What the map showed is that the problem was not a missing bot, it was information spread across Excel and inboxes. So the work starts at the base: one system that carries the whole job end to end, with the automation added on top. Their clients' documents stay private, in their own space, and never leave it.
“Objevo took a refreshingly honest approach to AI when our company contracted them, focusing on business outcomes rather than selling us technology. They recommended AI only where it delivered real value and proved to be equally confident in advising us on process improvements whenever they were the better solution. Would definitely recommend them!”
Founder, the Project Keel agency
What changes
- Every order comes in through a single route and is imported directly into the system, so nobody types the same details in again down the line.
- The provider and client emails are drafted by the system, and the provider confirms with one button instead of a day of back-and-forth.
- The details needed for a quote are read straight off scanned files in seconds, instead of being worked out by hand.
- Invoices, account statements and payment reminders build themselves from information that is already saved.
Where it stands
The design is agreed and the build is underway. The team is gradually transitioning to the new system, which includes migrating their data out of Excel, a careful job in itself. The numbers above are the agency's own estimates, written down before anything was built, so the results can be measured against a real starting point. Finding and allocating a provider is expected to drop from 15 to 40 minutes to a few minutes of checking and sending. The measured numbers will be added here once the system is live, whatever they turn out to be.
Your agency has a Lost Hours Map too
In a free 20-minute call, Objevo looks at how your team works day to day and shows you three places where hours go into repeated tasks, plus roughly what that costs you in a year.
Book a free Lost Hours Map →From what Objevo sees in practice, this way of working is closer to normal than rare: spreadsheets, inboxes, and the same emails typed again and again. If that sounds familiar, see how Objevo works.
