Plumbers for data
Your systems don't talk to each other. We make them.
Somewhere in your business, the same piece of information is being typed in twice. Somewhere else, a report is late because one person hasn't finished copying figures between two screens. None of it appears on a balance sheet, and all of it costs you.
The software is usually fine. It's the gaps between the software that leak. Work falls into them, gets picked up by hand, and gets put back in a slightly different shape.
You already know where yours are. See how many of these you recognise.
An order arrives by email. Someone keys it into the CRM. Someone keys it into the accounting system. Someone keys it into a spreadsheet so it turns up in the weekly report. Three chances to get it wrong, and no way to tell which one is right.
One person built it. It runs a genuinely important part of the business. Nobody else understands the formulas, there's no version history, and they're on leave next week.
Not because Tuesday matters, but because that's when somebody has time to do it by hand. Everything downstream waits for Tuesday.
And the first is spent working out which of the four figures is the real one. By the time everyone agrees on a number, it's describing a month you can no longer do anything about.
And leaves as a PDF, having been read by a person in between for the sole purpose of moving six fields into a form.
Your stock level, your customer's address, the value of your pipeline: each depends on which screen you happen to be looking at. Everyone has quietly picked a favourite.
Almost nobody needs new software. They need the software they're already paying for to stop behaving like four separate businesses. That's the whole job: work out where the work actually flows, then build the joins so it flows without a person in the middle.
We do it end to end, from the first survey through to the thing running in production at three in the morning while nobody watches.
Getting your systems to talk. CRM to accounting, warehouse to online store, supplier portal to whatever you use to plan the week. Most of these tools already have a way in. Very few businesses are using it.
Taking the person out of the middle. Approvals that route themselves, records that create themselves, the Tuesday job that now runs the moment its trigger arrives rather than when somebody gets around to it.
For the steps that need judgement rather than movement: reading an invoice, classifying an enquiry, pulling six fields out of an unstructured document, drafting the first version of a reply. We use it where it genuinely beats a rule, and nowhere else.
One number, one source, available when you ask rather than four days after you asked. A pipe that doesn't end somewhere useful is just an expensive hole.
Every join made by hand is a join that will fail. Quietly, eventually, and at the worst available moment.
The cheapest automation is the step you delete. We look for those first, even when it makes the invoice smaller.
No account managers, no handover to a junior, no layer between you and the work. You talk to the people building it, every time.
Not status reports and not slide decks. You should be able to watch the thing running before you've finished paying for it.
Your accounts, your code, your infrastructure, your data. No lock-in and nothing held hostage. Walk away whenever you like and it all keeps working.
We fix the worst one, prove it holds, and only then move to the next. Big-bang transformations are how this kind of work got its bad name.
Before anything gets built, you get a picture of your own business that you probably don't have yet: where information comes in, where it stops, and who is moving it by hand.
A couple of hours with the people who actually do the work, tracing where information enters and where it gets stuck. You get a diagram of your current system and a ranked list of the leaks, with what each one is costing you.
We pick one: the smallest job with the biggest bleed. Working and in use in weeks rather than quarters, so you can judge us on something real instead of a proposal.
Once one join is proven, every join after it is cheaper. We keep going for as long as there's a leak worth fixing, and we tell you plainly when there isn't.
No pitch deck, and no discovery phase you have to pay for. Describe the job that keeps getting done by hand and we'll tell you straight whether it's worth automating. If it isn't, we'll say so.
Based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Working with anyone whose systems have stopped speaking to each other.
Every week this waits, the same work gets done twice.
reece@patersonprojects.com