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Real business owners. Real bottlenecks. Fixed on camera.
Each week Paul sits down with a guest who's stuck — in manual work, disconnected tools, or processes their business has outgrown. They diagnose it live, map the fix, and start building. No theory, no fluff, no generic AI takes. Just the exact solution Paul would build for a paying client, handed over for free on camera.
Every episode is a case study your ICP can't stop watching — because it's their business on the screen.
PAUL KORTMAN:
(00:00):
So they were reaching out to us saying, "Is it even possible?" We've heard some promises. They specifically had heard about Airtable and they thought, "Okay, can we even put this data in Airtable? Will Airtable help us? Is Airtable the right solution?" And so that's where we started with them is, "Okay, let's look into Airtable. Let's see what capabilities are there, et cetera." But the fun part was going through that discovery process and just being like, "How are you guys living today with this struggle?" They were excited to be able to see somebody else experience the pain that they had. Every business has inefficient processes, limited hours and technology that really isn't pulling its weight. This is Connex the Dots where real problems meet real solutions used by real businesses. So I'm Paul Cortman. Let's connect some dots.
(00:58):
So we had this client come to us, let's call them Central Door Manufacturer. And they make custom doors including glass and all of this, but they were just having difficulty with their order tracking system. They had a great system that was being able to estimate their orders and create orders. But then once it got to production, it was just kind of a mess. They had multiple issues there causing a lot of inefficiencies. To set the scene, when they came to us, well, they would release them in batches. And so usually a batch would have like 10 orders. It depends on how many doors were in each order. Figure anywhere from 10 to 40 doors per order and they'd release a batch of 10. This whole batch concept was just because they kept losing orders and orders would get out of order. So there were multiple little steps along the way that they had over the years built a kind of like a, well, this is how we do things here at Central Door.
(02:02):
And it's like, yeah, that is how you do them because you were solving for a problem in your process. What if we could automate that? You can start to see the complexities really amplified with each piece because there's probably eight to 10 different things that could be done with each piece. And each piece is on one piece of an order of anywhere from 10 to 40 doors. So when we first met the client, they gave us an overview of like, we have about eight stations on the floor. And I never visited the client, this is all remote, but it was in my mind just kind of visualizing, okay, so they released 10 orders and each order gets a cart. And as the raw wood gets cut and put on that cart, that cart goes through these eight stations and each piece gets handled inside each station.
(02:57):
But they kind of have this backlog of it's waiting for the next station. So each station generally had five to 10 carts per station, sometimes more. So you multiply that out with eight stations, 10 orders per station. You had about 80 orders on the floor at any given time and with another 10 coming each day. But remember, I'll just run the numbers through for you again. Each order is 10 to 40 doors. Each door goes through at least five stations, maybe eight stations, and each station could have anywhere of 10 to 15 customized processes for each one of those doors. So there was no way to map out every order and every single step that needed to happen, but yet that's how they were thinking through this process because each order had roughly 10 to 15,000 steps that needed to happen, different steps on different doors and different pieces.
(04:05):
They had done a good job with paper keeping it up to date or keeping it to this point. But when they came to us, it was not that they were bursting at the seams, they just knew that they could be more efficient. And with that complexity, there was no software that was built for them. They had two types of customers. The general population like you and I call and order a door or a series of doors for our remodel work if you're handy. But the majority of it came through general contractors who were building custom homes and their project manager needed to line up schedules and deliveries and, "Hey, when are these doors coming so that we can make sure we can install them?" And so they called frequently and spoke with the admin staff of like, "Hey, where's my doors? How's the status? When's my delivery? Are we still okay?"
(05:01):
Well, every time one of those contractors or consumers called, the office staff would have to go filter through the 80 orders on the floor to find that order, to check the process, to see where they're at, to see if there's any pieces that broke. And so they call those remakes and then they'd have to run them back through the previous stations getting caught up to that order. Yeah, a lot of things that could go wrong, but that office admin having to physically go to the floor to find the order is where even more inefficiencies happened because now that admin just spent 20, 30, maybe 40 minutes of their day to solve one question and they're having 20 to 30 phone calls a day. And so they had multiple admin just answering the phone that would go down to the floor to find orders, come back up and call back and say, "Here's where your order is. Here's the expected delivery date."
(06:00):
It was insane. Just listening to them tell this story, it's like, are you crazy? How do you employ people that their job is just to go down to the floor, find out where this order is, take a half hour figuring that out, come back up and call back the customer. In today's day and age, we are past 2020 at this point when we were talking, it was like 2022. And how come you don't have some sort of automated order checking system? So yeah, that still happens. And for those of you listening, you might be feeling that yourselves of, well, now it's 2026 or 2027 and I still don't have that part digitized in a way that's efficient for me to look up. They were in the same situation. It didn't really feel like the 21st century, as if that's not complicated enough.
(06:53):
I hadn't talked about how over the years they developed processes to take care of problems they ran into. Let me tell you about the remake process that they had. So if in an order of 40 doors, one door got chipped or cracked or the glass broke or something happened in the manufacturing process, they didn't want to send the whole order back through the system again because 90% of it's fine. It's just this one door needs to go through. I mean, all the way down to it needs to be cut out of a slab of wood again and go through the whole process again. But it needs priority because now you can't have that order wait for the 17 orders behind it. That door needs to skip and go ahead of everybody else. They had already set this system up, which I was really impressed with.
(07:43):
They had a dedicated printer with pink paper. And so if they had a remake, a guy on the floor would notify an admin that this piece on this order needed to be remade. The admin would type into the computer, make it happen, and it would print on that printer. And the guys on the floor, the staff on the floor, they knew when something came off that printer, whenever they saw a pink piece of paper tied to a door, they knew that was a remake and that had to skip the line in their station and run through the process faster to catch up to its order. So you take the normal complicated process that they had and now you exponentially complicate it to another layer of, okay, now you have 39 doors that are moving forward and they're on station seven and you have this one door that's on station four and it's got to catch up to those 39 up at station seven in time for delivery, but you can't forget it.
(08:47):
And so somebody has to quality control those orders to then go back and be like, "Well, where's the remake?" Well, if the remake got stuck or forgotten or lost in a pile at station two, now the whole order is delayed. So if a contractor had called in and said, "Where's my order?" And an admin had gone and looked and noticed there was a remake that the order was waiting on, then they'd have to go find the remake to be able to answer the question. Or they might miss that the remake even exists. And so they'll say, "Oh, it'll be there on Tuesday, but the remake won't be done till Thursday. And so the whole order would be delayed until Thursday." That was just one of the things that they had in their process that they knew was an issue, but they couldn't figure out a way to solve for that.
(09:34):
The staff on the floor, they wanted to do the work. They wanted to make the doors and they were doing the best they could to get that door moving through the process. But if you've ever worked with handcrafted wood, staining takes time, drying takes time, painting takes time. And then molding takes time and letting the glue set up takes time. So you can't just make it happen. It takes time to work through the process. We had to come up with some creative solutions for that. As you can see, if I haven't made it clear, they had a complicated process. And that's why they reached out to us because in their case, they had heard that there was a possibility for an automation to actually make their process better. They had looked into custom code and it was a hundred grand and eight to nine months or more and maybe not even being able to accomplish it.
(10:32):
There wasn't that much profit margin to be able to put a hundred grand into custom code for this when they had their employees able to do the work. It wasn't like if they built that custom code, they would end up making more money or being able to produce more. It was more along the lines of just being able to answer more efficiently and they could maybe churn out a couple of orders faster. It would increase their production, but it wouldn't necessarily make them more money to cover that hundred grand in custom software. So they were reaching out to us saying, "Is it even possible?" We've heard some promises. They specifically had heard about Airtable and they though, "Okay, can we even put this data in Airtable? Will Airtable help us? Is Airtable the right solution?" And so that's where we started with them is, okay, let's look into Airtable.
(11:28):
Let's see what capabilities are there, et cetera. But the fun part was going through that discovery process and just being like, "How are you guys living today with this struggle?" They were excited to be able to see somebody else experience the pain that they had. So before I get into specifics of what tools we used and how we solve their problems, let's work through the process that we go through. I don't want to make you feel like, "Oh, this is an enterprise. We have a four week discovery and then a 10 week planning and all of this. " We're very much fans of low-code, no code here at Connex. And so what we know is that we can try things and if they don't work, we haven't wasted time and effort as long as we haven't built anything custom. So what we end up doing is in their case, we knew we needed a place for the data.
(12:27):
A place for the data to reside so that the people on the floor could communicate to the people at the admin of where the orders are in the process. What we try to do is we boil it down to what is the one thing that could be most beneficial? So we look at the whole process, we kind of walk through each step of your workflow or in their case, the door manufacturer's workflow of like, "Okay, where in here would be a building block that would be helpful?" And we start with that and then we build upon it. So in their case, what we ended up doing was each piece needed a barcode and then we needed barcode scanners on the floor so that the folks on the floor could scan those barcodes and then that data go into the database. So that's where we started.
(13:20):
It seems kind of backwards like, "Don't you want to plan this all out and have a good robust idea of what you're going to build? And we feel kind of a little differently. And maybe you might think we're crazy and that's fine. We're not for everybody." But what we ended up doing was starting with just the basic like we need to keep it as simple as possible for the folks on the floor. They just want to build beautiful doors. And so we want to enable them to do their craft, but we need some sort of communication back. So what we ended up doing was finding the right tool and we found this one tool that made it super simple where you would scan a barcode and it would just put that barcode information in the timestamp in a spreadsheet. And we knew at that point we had it.
(14:12):
And you might think, okay, a barcode and a timestamp in a spreadsheet? How is that going to help anything? And even our client was like, "I've seen that, but what is that going to do any good for me? " And what we were able to do with that was once we had it in the spreadsheet, we could then put that information into the database, tie it in with an order and be able to run all the calculations to be able to say, "Here's where this order is in the process." That's how we tend to work trying to find what's one thing that we could do, a minor change in process that will lead or enable automation to be able to be better had. Once we have the data in a database or once we have the data somewhere, there's a whole lot of automation that can be done.
(15:02):
But crossing the barrier from a physical world to a digital world was the trick that they didn't know and didn't know how to do. Once we had that, it became a huge unlock that then now we had all kinds of formulas and stuff we could run. If all 40 of these doors were scanned in to this station, then we changed the status of the order to that station. So you can kind of see the process and how that started the dominoes of like, "Oh, once we have that data, then we're good to go. " And we built from there. Now in this case, I did scope it all out. They went through probably an hour process of writing down every stage on the floor that doors would go through and what were the triggers in an order number or in the order line items to be able to know what each door needed.
(16:01):
We even went to the point of we could calculate the total human hours it would take for each order. If a station was down to be able to say, "Okay, that's going to slow down these three orders by one day. Here's the new calculated results." So all of that because we started with the scanner. And instead of us planning it all out and developing this whole document to be able to hand back to them of like, "Here's what your process will look like. " We said, "Would the folks on the floor be willing to scan these items?" And what we ended up doing was doing a barcode for each item and a barcode for entry into a station and exit from a station. So when they got a door, they'd scan it, scan the door, and then scan the barcode on their entry point to the station.
(16:54):
And that told the computer system, "Okay, it's in this station. It's going to be here for three days because the glue has to dry, but that's the only piece that needs to go through that. The other 39 are just hanging out in this station waiting." There was a lot of math that came after that. But what we try to do is build the core feature that will help the most right away. And then beyond that, expand it because there's always more that can be done. Projects like these never finish and we're pretty used to that. I mean, you're probably nodding your head of like, "Oh, I could always make this process better and I could always make that process better." And instead of defining the ultimate process of processes, what we do is, "Hey, let's make it one step better and then let's make it one step better.
(17:46):
And then let's make it one step better before we get into the results of this case study. If your team is spending time on manual process checks like these supervisors are, Connex Digital actually offers free process audits where we'd love to help. The link is in the show notes. Now that you know how to map your process and what we did to work with central door manufacturing, let's go back to actually how we solved it and what the outcomes of the solution are. As we talked about, there were multiple admin staff, four admin staff spending 40 to 60 minutes on each phone call trying to find out where each order was. We quickly reduced that down to one staff member who would take maybe two minutes, probably less. They could type in an order number, they could type in an order name. So the person of the contractor calling for the question and they could get to, well, here's the status and here's the expected delivery date.
(18:49):
So single call, the person calls in, got an answer within three to five minutes, and a single person could handle all of the same phone calls that it took four people to handle previously. Now, good news, they didn't end up firing those other three people because they have a backlog of work on the admin side, billing, sales, quotes, all of that. And so it's not like we came in to help lose admin staff. It was more along the lines of they weren't able to do their other jobs because they were answering the phone. Now they're able to do their other jobs. It freed them up to support the sales staff and be able to do more custom quotes, which inevitably will grow the business. Let's assume it took 45 minutes on average per order. They'd get probably an average of four of those per person per day and they had four admin answering the phones.
(19:48):
So you're talking roughly 12 hours that we've reduced there. Now that you've seen how we've helped Central Door Manufacturing and how we walk through their process, let's connect the dots for you. Jump on a call, be happy to help, walk through your process, talk through inefficiencies or struggles that you're having, and we'll see ways in which we can perhaps automate one or two steps or more to be able to increase productivity and build in efficiencies inside your business. We'll see you on the next session of Connex the Dots. So if you're listening to this and you want to understand more about how to practically improve the efficiencies inside your business, check out our other episodes. That's what they're here for. But if you're ready to start, reach out. We offer a no-cost consultation and I'd be happy to help you.