The ops team was saturated; leadership was considering a hire.
The client operates in international student financing support. A substantial share of ops work consisted of manually chaining repetitive steps across several tools. Leadership was considering hiring to absorb growth. Our read on day one: before adding a person, size the real cost of the missing tooling.
Time-tracking, instrumentation, audit report delivered end of week 1.
Ten business days of quantitative time-tracking on the ops team to identify the real bottlenecks, instrumentation of manual steps, analysis of throughput variance between operators. Audit report delivered end of week one: four prioritised levers, expected productivity gain ranging from two to three-and-a-half times depending on the scenario, ROI prioritisation signed off before any development.
Targeted refactor, no rewrite, progressive production rollout.
Refactor of the three most time-costly screens, AI automations on the repetitive steps surfaced by time-tracking, API integrations with existing tools (CRM, payment, documents). Progressive rollout to contain risk, operator training run in parallel, user documentation delivered. Legacy was left untouched where it worked.