A Midwest custom manufacturer, newly acquired by private equity, installed a Harvard-educated COO to professionalize operations.
Within months, the COO was consuming nearly half his working hours pulling data exports, running VLOOKUPs, and managing a 20-to-30-tab Excel workbook just to generate the information he needed to do his actual job. The business had no clear visibility into cash flow, labor profitability, or cost-per-job. Job quoting relied entirely on the CEO’s institutional intuition, creating extreme key-person risk. Without intervention, the organization would continue bleeding executive capacity to manual data wrangling while flying blind on profitability.
Stalliant built a unified data model for a PE-acquired Midwest custom manufacturer, starting with Power Query connected to Excel and QuickBooks, then expanding into Microsoft Fabric and Azure for data pipelines and nightly snapshots, with ML applied to job quoting and OCR deployed for purchase orders and invoices, all within the client’s existing Microsoft environment with no new SaaS licenses required.
Automation returned approximately $500,000 per year in combined executive and operator time, $100,000 attributed directly to the COO’s reclaimed capacity (50% of his role), with an additional $300,000–$400,000 from employees no longer tied up in manual Excel processes.
With accurate, real-time visibility into labor hours, cost of goods, and vendor expenses, the client could quote custom manufacturing jobs with precision for the first time, translating to a 5–15% bottom-line margin improvement on individual jobs.
All job quoting had previously flowed through the CEO’s intuition, a single point of failure. The new system encoded historical data into an ML-assisted quoting foundation, removing the CEO as the sole dependency on the firm’s most critical pricing decisions.
- How a Mid-Market CFO Halved Board Reporting TimeEventus Advisory Group · Financial Services
- How One Manufacturer Cut Diligence Waits 80% With AIScaylor · Manufacturing & Industrial
- How A Preschool Operator Lifted Labor Productivity 50%SaxeCap · Education & EdTech
- How a PE-Backed SaaS Cut Insight Time Weeks to MinutesSynopsis · Technology & Software