Enterprise Workflow Automation

Discovery and Process Mapping

We spent the first two weeks on-site (one week at each office) interviewing 14 team members — from the founder and practice leads to junior consultants and the accounts coordinator. We weren't just mapping workflows on paper; we sat with the operations lead while she did her Friday reporting and documented every tab switch, copy-paste, and manual lookup in real time.

Two findings from discovery reshaped the project scope significantly.

First, the team's actual workflow was different from what leadership described. Leadership believed consultants updated Asana daily. In practice, most consultants updated it once a week — if at all — and the real project status lived in WhatsApp group chats. Any platform we built had to account for this by making status updates faster than sending a WhatsApp message, or people simply wouldn't use it.

Second, the operations lead's Excel workbook was far more sophisticated than anyone realized. It didn't just track resource allocation — it calculated blended billing rates, flagged projects approaching budget limits, and generated a utilization heatmap that leadership relied on for staffing decisions. We had to replicate this logic exactly, not approximately, in the new system.

Iterative Build

We structured the build into three releases over 12 weeks.

Release 1 (Weeks 1-4): Client engagement management and project tracking — the core module. We replaced Zoho CRM and Asana with a unified view where each client engagement had its own workspace containing the pipeline status, staffing assignments, task board, and document links. Consultants could update project status in under 30 seconds — faster than typing a WhatsApp message. We deployed this to a pilot group of 8 people and iterated based on feedback before rolling out company-wide.

Release 2 (Weeks 5-8): Resource allocation and the profitability engine. This was the hardest module. We reverse-engineered the operations lead's Excel formulas into a rules engine that calculated blended billing rates, tracked actual vs. budgeted hours, and flagged engagements that were trending toward margin erosion. The operations lead validated every calculation against her spreadsheet until the numbers matched exactly.

Release 3 (Weeks 9-12): Invoicing, financial dashboards, and the executive reporting layer. We integrated with Tally via its API for accounting sync, built a one-click invoice generator tied to logged hours and contract terms, and created the dashboards that gave leadership their real-time view of revenue, utilization, and pipeline health.

Data Migration and Transition

Data migration was more complex than initially scoped — which is typical in projects like this. Zoho CRM data exported cleanly, but the Asana export had inconsistencies: project names didn't match between systems, some closed engagements in Zoho still showed as active in Asana, and historical task assignments were incomplete.

We built a migration pipeline in Python that pulled from Zoho's and Asana's APIs, cross-referenced records using client name and engagement date as matching keys, flagged conflicts for manual review, and loaded clean data into PostgreSQL. The operations lead reviewed 40+ flagged records manually — a process that took about two days but ensured no historical data was lost or misattributed.

For the transition itself, we ran both systems in parallel for three weeks. The firm continued using their existing tools while the team got familiar with the new platform. We tracked adoption daily: by the end of Week 2, 85% of project status updates were happening in the new system. By the end of Week 3, the old tools were effectively abandoned. We didn't force anyone to switch — the platform was simply faster and more useful than the tools it replaced.