Case Studies

The Situation

The VP of Finance at a commercial real estate platform managing 200+ properties across North America had a working theory: "We're probably overpaying something, but we have no idea where or how much." Her team was manually cross-referencing invoices 40+ hours per month with no centralized tracking and no audit trail. No visibility into whether vendors were honoring contracted discounts or submitting duplicates.

What We Found

• Vendor A: Billing for 3 licenses, only 1 in use: $18K/year overcharge
• Vendor B: Volume discount not applied for 12 months: $22K missed
• Vendor C: Three duplicate line items per monthly invoice: $8K
• Vendor D: Auto-renewed at old rate instead of contracted −15% discount: $12K
• Vendor E: Setup fees charged that the contract explicitly waived: $5K

What We Did

• Phase 1: Forensic Audit (Weeks 1–2): Collected all vendor contracts from the past two years. Mapped every invoice line against contract terms. Built a contract-vs-invoice comparison document for each vendor.
• Phase 2: Negotiation & Recovery (Weeks 3–4): Escalated past account managers to finance and legal contacts. Recovered $150K in credits and refunds within 30 days of negotiation start.
• Phase 3: Prevention System (Week 5+): Deployed a Power BI dashboard with real-time spend tracking, anomaly alerts for invoices >5% above average, contract terms visibility, auto-renewal calendar, and quarterly billing reviews.

Results

The Situation

A regional law firm network with 12 attorneys and 8 staff was growing but operationally capped. The managing partner spent six hours per month manually tallying deal counts across three disconnected systems: a Google Sheets lead list, Word doc retainer contracts, and a legacy billing platform. Roughly 30% of inbound leads were falling through the cracks due to no automated follow-up.

What We Did

• Phase 1: Process Mapping (Weeks 1–2): Mapped the full lifecycle from first inquiry to signed retainer. Identified five manual handoff points that could be automated before touching any tool.
• Phase 2: HubSpot Build (Weeks 2–3): Migrated all contacts from three legacy systems into a unified CRM. Built a four-stage pipeline with three automated sequences: lead intake, consultation reminders, and proposal follow-up with billing trigger on signature.
• Phase 3: Training (Week 4): Three tailored sessions for receptionists (30 min), attorneys (1 hr), and the managing partner (2 hrs). Focus: the system works for you, not instead of you.

Results

The Situation

A large enterprise client required a full transition of its IT environment into a structured managed services model. At the time of engagement, operations were reactive and fragmented: the asset inventory had never been formally validated, maintenance activities were unscheduled, and there were no defined protocols for escalation or stakeholder communication.

The core challenge: the environment could not move toward compliance or scale reliably without a governance foundation in place before any execution work began.

Key Challenges

• No verified asset inventory: active and inactive systems were not clearly separated
• No formal approval process for changes to production environments
• Maintenance activities executed without structured scheduling or risk controls
• No incident escalation model or defined after-hours support path

What We Did

• Phase 1: Environment Assessment: Conducted a full inventory review to establish a verified, accurate baseline. Removed inactive assets from the active scope to eliminate execution risk and ensure clean data for ongoing operations.
• Phase 2: Governance Framework: Established written approval requirements as mandatory gates before any production changes. Implemented backup verification and pre-change validation as standard prerequisites. Defined escalation paths, on-call contacts, and stakeholder communication standards.
• Phase 3: Structured Maintenance Cadence: Transitioned the client from ad-hoc maintenance to a predictable, phased monthly schedule with clearly defined windows and rollback procedures. Coordinated cloud tooling to automate and track execution across the environment.

Results

The Situation

An enterprise software client needed to bring an AI-powered decision support system from proof-of-concept to a validated, production-ready state, on a fixed timeline tied to a major external business commitment. The date could not move.

Three independent vendor organizations were involved, each contributing a different layer of the solution. None had a shared delivery rhythm, and the project carried significant compliance requirements: every system decision had to be fully traceable for audit purposes.

The Complexity

• Three independent organizations with no prior shared delivery process or aligned priorities
• Development dependencies on test environments and simulated data; blocking risk was high across all teams
• AI projects naturally attract scope expansion: new capabilities were continuously proposed, threatening the delivery timeline
• Compliance requirements meant outputs had to be fully explainable and auditable, not just functional

What We Did

• Cross-Org Coordination: Established a unified project cadence across all three organizations. Created a shared RACI so every team knew exactly what they owned and what required sign-off before proceeding.
• Dependency Management: Worked with technical leads to design parallel workstreams that removed inter-team blocking. Teams were able to progress simultaneously without waiting on each other's environments or data.
• Scope Discipline: Maintained a strict boundary between what was in scope for this delivery phase and what was deferred. Every proposed addition was evaluated against one criterion: does this need to ship now? Deferred items were documented for the next phase.
• Delivery Governance: Ran structured weekly alignment sessions, maintained a live risk log, and kept all stakeholders (technical and executive) informed with consistent reporting through the full delivery cycle.

Results