Insurance brokerage
The same policy, keyed into three systems
18 minof keying, every single policy touch
Carrier portal, management system, CRM. None of them talk, so every policy touch is typed out again — around eighteen minutes, every time.
Fixed: captured once where it first exists, pushed to the rest, and renewals chase themselves instead of living in someone's memory.
Accounting practice
Two weeks of chasing before work starts
11.4 daysthe average time to fully onboard one client
Documents get asked for one at a time as someone realises they're needed. The client sends four of seven. Onboarding stretches past a fortnight.
Fixed: everything requested once, up front, with the chasing running itself and stopping the moment a document lands.
Creative agency
Feedback arriving in four different places
30%of agency hours lost to unbilled scope creep
A marked-up PDF, a Loom, a reply-all, a text to the account manager on Friday. Someone stitches it together before a designer can touch it.
Fixed: it all lands against one version, and contradictions get flagged before the revision is built, not after.
Logistics
The warehouse and the books disagree
35 hrsa week of manual entry between two systems
Two systems hold the same shipment and neither writes to the other. Somebody reconciles daily, and the misses show up as wrong invoices at month end.
Fixed: entered once at the operational end, and mismatches surface the same day instead of during close.
Clinic group
The Tuesday slot nobody refilled
$300–500lost for every empty chair hour
Recall lists get built by hand and worked between patients arriving — so they're dropped exactly when the schedule most needs filling.
Fixed: a cancellation offers itself to whoever wanted an earlier appointment, before the hour is lost for good.
DTC & wholesale
Finding out from the customer
35–45%of all support tickets are “where is my order”
A shipment stalls and nobody watches the tracking feed, so the first anyone hears is a support ticket that's already angry. Wholesale orders get retyped from PDFs.
Fixed: stalled shipments trigger contact before the complaint, and purchase orders arrive staged for one-click confirmation.
Professional services
Monday's numbers, made on Friday
1.8 hrsa day per person, just collecting and entering data
Utilisation, billing and pipeline live in three places. The weekly view is assembled by hand, so it's late — and decisions get made on a fortnight-old picture.
Fixed: the view builds itself continuously, and thresholds raise themselves before anyone has to notice.
Figures above are published industry benchmarks for each sector — they describe the size of the problem, not results I'm claiming. Sources available on request.