A major UK steelworks
Seeing the molten iron a plant was losing
The problem
Molten iron travelled by rail between the ironworks and the
steel plant in insulated torpedo carriages. If a carriage waited
too long on the way, the iron solidified inside it and the load
was ruined. Everyone knew losses were happening. Nobody could say
where, how often, or what they cost, because no system observed
the journey between the two plants. The problem had stood
unsolved for twenty years.
The operational cost
Every solidified load was money poured away, and the absence of
measurement was itself a cost: without evidence, no department
owned the problem, so nothing changed. The plant was blind to a
waste stream worth millions of pounds.
What we did
We instrumented the route itself: GPS units on the locomotives,
geo-zones around the sites they passed through, and the
weighbridge the plant already operated. A state machine
read each train's movements between zones and inferred what it
was doing at every moment: loading, in transit, waiting,
delivering. For the first time, every load had a traceable
journey with timestamps.
The result
Losses stopped being anecdote and became measured fact. The
system showed which loads were being lost, where they waited too
long, and what each failure cost. That evidence put pressure on
the departments in a position to fix the delays, which the plant
had never before been able to direct at anyone in particular.
Measured impact
Millions of pounds of material waste made visible and
attributable, on a route the business had run blind for two
decades.
How it was built
The build was modest: GPS units, geo-zones and a weighbridge the
plant largely already owned. The piece that had been missing for
twenty years was a model of the process the trains were actually
following.
A national service business
Automating job intake
The problem
Customer job requests arrived through portals and shared
inboxes, and a team retyped each one into the CAFM system before
any work could be scheduled. As volumes grew, the retyping grew
with them.
The operational cost
Every request cost minutes of manual entry and carried the risk
of transcription errors, duplicated jobs and missed
instructions. Response times depended on how deep the inbox was
on any given morning.
What we did
We mapped the intake path end to end, then automated it, so
that requests arrive in the CAFM system as structured jobs
without a person in the middle. Incomplete or ambiguous requests
route to a person for judgement; everything else flows straight
through.
The result
Job intake stopped being a typing task and became an
exception-handling task. The team's time moved from data entry
to the requests that genuinely needed attention.
Measured impact
More than 1,100 administrative hours removed in the first
measured period, now running at around 1,500 hours a year: most
of a full-time role, returned by one integration.
How it was built
By integrating with the CAFM platform the business already owned
and leaving it in place. The routine path was automated; human
review was reserved for exceptions.
A national service business
Shortening the path from sale to invoice
The problem
Between a salesperson winning work and an invoice being issued
sat a paper process: a job pack that toured department after
department, collecting checks, approvals and rekeying at each
stop, before landing with a dedicated team whose job was to
write up the specification by hand. Nobody had designed the
route. It had simply accumulated.
The operational cost
Hundreds of manual intervention points on the path from sale to
invoice. Every one added delay, and many existed only to catch
the errors the previous ones introduced. Working capital sat
tied up in work that was finished but not yet billable.
What we did
We mapped the pipeline end to end, then rebuilt it as one
connected flow, integrated with the legacy reporting, accounting
and stock systems the business already ran. Specifications are
now generated by the system rather than written by hand, and the
checks that mattered were built into the flow itself.
The result
The job pack no longer tours the departments, because there is
nothing for them to check: information entered once at the point
of sale flows through to the invoice. The specification-writing
function was absorbed entirely into the system.
Measured impact
Hundreds of manual intervention points removed from a single
pipeline, and an entire manual specification-writing workload
eliminated.
How it was built
By connecting the existing sales, operations and finance systems
so that information entered once flowed through, with no
platform replacement involved.
These engagements were delivered by ESP's principal prior to the
founding of Executive Systems Partners. Client names are withheld
under confidentiality obligations.