Whilst a lot of our business focusses on larger workflow automation systems, a couple of recent projects we delivered highlight the huge benefits SMEs can reap from much smaller automation projects. Both focused on taking a cumbersome, manual task and creating an automation that greatly reduced its draw on the company's resources.
This post walks through one of them in detail — including the actual arithmetic — because the numbers involved surprise most people, and the numbers are the whole story.
The problem: order updates eating staff time
The project involved a company that takes orders from its clients and moves them through a multi-stage manufacturing flow before delivering the final items. As part of this, the clients needed to know where each order was in the process, so that they could keep their own customers appraised and schedule follow-on actions.
Before our solution, that meant a lot of staff time spent sending emails, making phone calls and responding to enquiries. All of it was a drain on the company's resources — and their clients were still getting the information they needed in piecemeal fashion, which they then had to manually translate into their own internal CRM systems. The same facts, keyed in twice, by two different companies, every working day.
The solution: a bridge between ClickUp and HubSpot
Our customer managed their production process in ClickUp. Many of their clients used HubSpot to manage their own customers. We were approached to build an integration between the two.
The mechanics are straightforward to describe. As part of the order process, the HubSpot ID of the end customer is entered into the ClickUp system alongside the order. Our solution then monitors the progress of each order through ClickUp and seamlessly updates the relevant HubSpot contact in real time with the status of the order — along with other pertinent information if certain details of the order change.
The benefits of this relatively simple solution were manifold:
- It reduced the need for manual intervention by our customer's staff to almost nothing.
- It gave their clients access to real-time information without any manual effort on their side either. The relevant information was always going to be in HubSpot, ready whenever they needed to interact with their customers.
- It included an easy-to-use dashboard providing an overview of the whole process, along with audit trails and automated error monitoring — so when something does go wrong, it is visible immediately rather than discovered later by an unhappy customer.
The result was more available staff resource on both sides of the equation, which could now be used for more profitable work, and an overall increase in customer satisfaction all round.
It all comes down to the bottom line
Despite the evident benefits listed above, it all comes down to the bottom line — and this is where a lot of companies fail to realise how even a small, low-cost automation can make significant savings over a relatively short time.
Take the example above, and assume the task of providing order updates to clients and responding to their enquiries was handled by a single member of staff — no particular specialism, earning an average salary of around £26K per annum. That resolves to an actual cost to the company, for employing this person, of around £22.00 per hour. If, over the course of a working week, this person spent roughly 2 hours per day performing the task, that equates to a cost to the company of a little over £10,000 per annum.
The cost of delivering our solution was less than that. So even factoring in a little time each week for this person to manage the system, coupled with a small monthly hosting and support cost, the break-even point is reached in less than a year.
And even that understates it. It does not account for the recovered time in which the member of staff can take on other, potentially profit-increasing work. Add the benefit of happier, better-serviced clients — who are far more likely to remain clients, because they are getting great service from you — and the break-even point in real terms arrives far sooner.
Could you just use Zapier?
You might read this and think: "This is great — but surely I can achieve the same with an off-the-shelf integration product like Zapier?"
For a very simple, low-volume integration, then yes — possibly. We mean that genuinely: if you need one trigger to produce one action a handful of times a day, a Zapier-style tool may well be the sensible answer, and paying for bespoke development would be overkill. Recommending it anyway would be the sort of advice that costs a company its reputation.
However, Zapier charges using a per-task model. A task is an interaction with another system — or running a filter, or incrementing a counter to accrue statistics. For anything other than a simple one-to-one integration, tasks soon mount up. And as you add more clients, or do more business with the clients you have, the cost escalates with your success.
Looking at our solution in operation, and estimating the number of Zapier task steps that would be required to implement something similar with just two to three clients, the annual cost of a Zapier version would have been in the order of £4–5K per year — every year. That figure does not include the cost of building the integration, either in your own time or by bringing in a third party to write it for you, nor the ongoing cost of maintaining it. Adding two or three more clients to the integration would roughly double the cost.
The structure of the cost is worth dwelling on. The off-the-shelf route is an annual, ongoing charge that grows with your volume, whereas the solutions we provide generally carry only a small annual running-cost component. Once you have recovered the initial investment, the running cost is minimal compared with the benefit you receive.
Why this project worked: the rung below was already in place
There is a reason this automation was quick to deliver, and it is worth understanding if you are eyeing up your own processes. Both companies had already done the digitising. Orders lived in ClickUp as structured records; customer relationships lived in HubSpot as structured records. Nothing important existed only in somebody's inbox, or in a spreadsheet with merged cells and a colour-coding scheme only one person understands.
We describe the journey to efficient operations as a ladder with three rungs: Digitise, then Automate, then AI. Automation is the middle rung, and it can only stand on the rung below it. If order status had lived in a spreadsheet updated "whenever someone gets a minute", there would have been nothing reliable for our integration to read, and no automation worth building. The saving of a little over £10,000 a year was available precisely because the data was already structured — it just needed connecting.
The corollary matters too. If your own version of this story is still at the spreadsheet stage, the right first project is not the integration — it is getting the process into a system that holds structured, trustworthy data. That project pays for itself as well, and it makes every automation that follows cheaper to build.
How to spot your own low-cost, high-return automation
The best candidates share a shape. Look for a task that is:
- Repetitive and rule-based. If you can write the steps down and they rarely vary, software can do them.
- Frequent. A few minutes many times a day beats an hour once a month. Frequency is where the savings compound.
- A copy job. The strongest signal of all: information that already exists in one system being manually moved into another. Nobody adds value by retyping.
- Measurable. You can estimate the hours it currently consumes — which means you can do the break-even arithmetic before spending anything.
Then run the same sums we did: hours per week on the task, multiplied by the true hourly cost of the person doing it, compared against a one-off build cost plus modest running costs. If the payback lands within a year or two, you have probably found your project.
It is worth doing this exercise with the people who actually perform the task, not just the managers who assume they know where the time goes. In our experience the two pictures rarely match: the task a manager believes takes half an hour a day often turns out, once you follow it around the office, to consume double that once you include the interruptions, the chasing and the corrections. The people doing the work already know which parts of their day are a waste of their talents. Ask them, and the candidate list writes itself.
A word of honesty in the other direction: not everything deserves automating. A task that is rare, highly variable, or genuinely dependent on human judgement will usually cost more to automate than it saves — and a bad automation that misfires quietly can be worse than the manual process it replaced. Start with the boring, high-frequency copy jobs. They are unglamorous, and they are where the money is.
In conclusion
We are sure that every business could identify elements of its day-to-day workflow that would benefit from an automation solution that helped deliver a better customer experience. Hopefully this example shows that the same project can also make a significant difference to the bottom line — and that "automation" does not have to mean a six-month programme. Sometimes it means one well-chosen bridge between two systems you already use.
If you think this could be you, then please get in touch for a no-obligation chat and let us help you make that difference.