Workflow automation — 15 hours/week back for ops team
Agency, 18 staff · Marketing & creative agency
An agency ops team spent half their week on manual data entry — copying client briefs between Slack, Google Sheets, project tools, and Xero. Zapier workflows broke silently every few weeks.
The problem
Same client data entered four times. Invoice chasing was manual. Reporting took a full day every Friday. Previous automation attempts failed because nobody documented what ran where.
Constraints
- — Must work with existing stack — no rip and replace
- — Non-technical ops team needs to understand failures
- — Budget for project, not enterprise iPaaS licence
Approach
Step 1
Process map
Mapped five highest-ROI manual processes — time tracked per task to build the business case.
Step 2
n8n build
Built reliable workflows on self-hosted n8n — client intake, project creation, invoice triggers, and weekly reporting with error alerts.
Step 3
AI augmentation
AI-powered email drafts for client follow-ups and proposal summaries — human approval before send.
Deliverables
- Five production n8n workflows
- Process documentation and ownership model
- Error alerting and monitoring setup
- Team training session
Results
- Time saved
- ~15 hours/week across ops team
- Reliability
- Documented workflows with error handling
- Reporting
- Friday report automated — 4 hrs → 20 min
- Follow-on
- Monthly retainer for new automations
“We finally stopped being the integration layer between our own software.”
Facing something similar?
Book a discovery call. In 30 minutes we'll identify the fastest path from your situation to a clear plan.
Book a Discovery Call