Guides / Where to start
What the back office actually does all day, which parts of it a machine can do, which parts still need a person, and where to start if you're going to start somewhere.
The job posting has been up for four months. You've had a handful of applications and none of them stayed past the first month. Meanwhile the orders keep coming in, and somebody has to type them.
I've spent about 25 years in manufacturing and owned and ran a machine shop for the better part of a decade, so I've sat on that side of it. The reflex is to keep hiring, because the work is real and somebody has to do it. But it's worth stopping first and looking at what the role actually does with its hours, because a lot of it isn't a job at all. It's typing something out of one system and into another.
Write down what the person in that seat does for a week, and it tends to come out looking like this:
Look at that list as an owner rather than as a job description. Almost none of it is judgment. It's moving information between systems that don't talk to each other, and the reason a person is doing it is that nobody ever connected the systems.
Here's what makes this worse than it looks. The work is dull and repetitive, which is exactly why it's hard to keep somebody in the seat. So you're competing for people to do the part of the job a machine should be doing, and losing them because of it.
The parts of that role that genuinely need a person are the parts nobody advertises for: knowing which customer will accept a substitution, catching that a drawing revision changed, hearing something in a phone call that isn't in the email. That work is worth paying for and it's worth keeping somebody good in. It's also maybe a third of the hours, and it's the third that gets squeezed out when the typing is behind.
Not the person. The typing.
Take the customer PO. The order lands in a shared mailbox. Something reads it, pulls out the part numbers, quantities, prices and dates, checks them against what was quoted, drafts the order in your system and flags anything that doesn't match. A person still looks at it before it commits. But they're checking a draft instead of building one from scratch, and the ones that match cleanly take seconds.
Or the vendor acknowledgments. Instead of nobody checking, every acknowledgment gets read and compared to the PO line by line, and once a day you get one email with only the ones that came back wrong. The rest, you never think about.
That's the shape of all of it. The machine does the reading, the comparing and the typing. The person does the deciding, and gets flagged only when there's something to decide about.
The honest answer is not "the biggest problem." It's the thing that happens the most times per week, because that's where a small fix compounds fastest and where you'll know quickly whether it worked.
I'd rather be straight with you than have you find out later.
Both, in specific places. AI does the reading of anything messy and written by a human. Ordinary code does the comparing, the arithmetic and the writing into your system, because that part has to be right every time. The split matters enough that it has its own page: AI is a good reader, it's a bad accountant.
No. All of this works on top of whatever you already run. Replacing a working system to fix your paperwork is the most expensive way to solve the smallest part of the problem.
Usually you already know, and it's whichever one somebody complained about this week. If you'd rather have a structured read on it before talking to anyone, the AI readiness assessment walks you through your own operation and gives you a report at the end. It's free and nobody has to call you.
The first call is free, about 30 minutes. After that it's a paid Diagnostic where I map how the work actually runs and tell you whether AI, a small build, or nothing at all is the honest answer. If something's worth building, it's quoted up front. No hourly meter.
The specific gaps, each written up on its own. Customer orders arriving as PDFs and getting keyed in by hand. Vendor POs going out with nobody reading the acknowledgments. Reports that the ERP won't produce and get rebuilt in a spreadsheet every week. Quotes that take too long to get out the door. And the know-how that only lives in one person's head, which is the one that gets expensive without warning.
Before you build any of it yourself, it's worth reading where drag-and-drop automation tools stop working, because some of this genuinely belongs in one and some of it very much doesn't. I'm based in Michigan and a fair amount of this work is with operations around West Michigan, though none of it needs me to be local.
Background monitors that watch vendor POs, order entry that reads the PDF and drafts the record, quoting that starts itself from the request, and reporting that lands in an inbox instead of waiting to be asked for. All deployed inside a precision manufacturing operation.
See what I’ve shipped →First call’s free. About 30 minutes, a straight conversation about what that seat actually does all week. If most of it genuinely needs a person, I’ll tell you that and you’ll have lost half an hour.