Stories that show what pragmatic automation delivers
Each scenario below is a composite of real conversations with Atlantic Canadian organisations. They set the stage for how we could scope pain points, build guardrails, and return value without locking you in once we understand your business.
Opportunity Explorer
Select an industry lane to see the priorities, recommended tooling, and how we keep operators, finance, and IT aligned from day one.
What we hear
- Invoices, freight claims, and proofs of delivery arrive in every format imaginable.
- Supervisors need to know where work is stuck without wading through spreadsheets.
- Vendors expect fast answers without sacrificing compliance evidence.
Our approach: Document intelligence, queue automation, and exception dashboards run on a customer-owned appliance or secure cloud tenant. Dispatch leads are trained to resolve edge cases without opening a support ticket.
Read the sample story See the delivery stepsIllustrative four-month impact
What we hear
- Month-end close drags because reconciliations span email threads and macros.
- Audit prep steals time from planning and cash-flow analysis.
- Executives want risk flags explained in business language, not system codes.
Our approach: Event-driven workflows reconcile ledgers, surface anomalies, and draft narratives for leadership. Everything runs inside your tenant—cloud or on-prem—with replayable evidence for auditors.
Read the sample storyException backlog burn-down
What we hear
- Every practice group onboards staff differently and compliance evidence goes missing.
- Access requests stack up, causing delays and audit headaches.
- Leaders want client impact metrics alongside operational ones.
Our approach: Workflow orchestration with identity automation keeps everyone on track. HR and IT teams learn to create new playbooks without logging a development ticket.
Read the sample storyOnboarding cycle-time illustration
How an engagement unfolds
Click through each industry to see the journey from the first workshop to measurable outcomes. Within each story you can toggle between the challenge, how we build, and the results your stakeholders care about.
Scenario (illustrative): disappearing paperwork and downstream chaos
A regional 3PL processes 8,000 invoices and claims a month. Documents live in shared drives, email, and physical folders. Supervisors lack a live queue, causing overtime and late-payment penalties.
- Finance spends 18 hours a week re-keying data.
- Vendors escalate if exceptions take more than 48 hours.
- No audit trail for why an amount changed after initial entry.
Document intelligence with guardrails
We stage a two-week discovery with ops and finance, then build an appliance-based workflow: AI extraction with human-in-the-loop validation and a queue console that shows status, blockers, and recovery steps.
- Document AI tuned on historic invoices plus business rules.
- Exception console with SLA timers and vendor notification templates.
- Daily sync to finance systems and read-only access for auditors.
Controllers in control, supervisors informed
Supervisors clear exceptions inside one workspace, finance can trace every change, and leadership sees a weekly ROI snapshot. Staff rotate through enablement labs to learn how to extend the playbook.
- Cycle time could drop materially (for example 60%+ in similar pilots), late-fee risk reduces, and finance receives weekly ROI snapshots once telemetry is in place.
- Audit evidence is generated automatically so prep time drops significantly before audits.
- Ops leads can extend the automations to adjacent workflows once the playbook is proven.
Key enablers
Azure Form Recognizer or Google DocAI, Camunda workflow engine, hardened on-prem appliance, Power BI dashboards.
Training focus
Dispatch and finance staff learn queue triage, exception coding, and how to author new vendor rules without code.
Risks mitigated
Vendor SLAs, compliance evidence, seasonal surge capacity, and continuity when connectivity blips.
Scenario (illustrative): close cycles that stretch forever
Controllers reconcile multiple ERPs and spreadsheets. Narrative reports are written manually, and risk teams only learn about variances after the close.
- 12+ data sources, inconsistent account mapping.
- Narrative creation pulls senior analysts off core work.
- Audit team requests manual walk-throughs every month.
Ledger automation with explainable AI
We ingest trial balances and subledgers with dbt pipelines, build reconciliation runbooks, and generate narratives using finance-tuned language models that cite the underlying data.
- Event-driven reconciliations with human approval checkpoints.
- Narrative drafts linked to RBI (Risk-Based Insights) dashboard.
- Audit portal with replayable evidence for any variance.
Faster close, trusted storytelling
Close accelerates by two days, leadership receives data-backed narratives, and auditors can replay every adjustment without extra meetings.
- Manual effort can drop dramatically (e.g., 50% in comparable pilots), letting analysts focus on forecasting.
- Risk flags are resolved faster because shared dashboards give everyone the same context.
- Finance owns prompt templates and threshold settings after enablement.
Key enablers
Azure Synapse, dbt, Azure OpenAI with retrieval, Power BI scorecards, ServiceNow approvals.
Training focus
Controllers learn to tune thresholds, analysts adapt prompt templates, auditors navigate replay portal.
Risks mitigated
Regulatory compliance, segregation of duties, manual errors, and undocumented narrative changes.
Scenario (illustrative): every onboarding a snowflake
A professional services firm onboards hundreds of employees yearly. Tasks span HR, IT, legal, and facilities, but there is no single view of progress or compliance evidence.
- Access provisioning tickets pile up in generic queues.
- Practice leaders lack visibility into billable readiness.
- Manual checklists make audits painful.
Workflow fabric with identity automation
We design playbooks for onboarding/offboarding, wire in identity automation, and create persona-based dashboards that show blockers and upcoming tasks.
- Hybrid architecture: identity stays on-prem, workflows in cloud.
- Self-service playbook builder for HR and IT owners.
- Compliance evidence automatically stored and tagged.
Ready-to-bill staff, confident auditors
Average onboarding time can drop substantially (illustratively 60%+), staff hit billable targets sooner, and audits finish with predictable effort.
- Most new playbooks can be authored internally after training.
- Compliance queries are resolved in minutes thanks to guided search and evidence capture.
- Employee satisfaction improves when status updates are transparent.
Key enablers
Power Apps or Retool consoles, Azure AD/Okta, DocuSign, Microsoft Teams integration, Dataverse/SQL telemetry.
Training focus
Playbook design labs, identity automation runbooks, frontline dashboards for practice leads.
Risks mitigated
Access drift, compliance evidence gaps, onboarding delays, and knowledge silos.
Deep dive library
Composite stories that highlight how technology, people, and change management line up. Use them to spark conversation with your own stakeholders.
An Atlantic logistics network cut turnaround times from weeks to hours while keeping finance and compliance in sync.
Automated reconciliations and AI-generated narratives helped a finance team close two days faster without sacrificing control.
Live dashboard that simulates 500 documents with per-file accuracy, value, and ROI accrual. Useful for showing how document intelligence pays back quickly.
Turn structured outputs into actions. Adjust hourly rate, utilization, context switching, and review rigor with sliders. Watch ROI and time-saved graphs update in real time.
Illustrative pilot dashboard
When we run a pilot, we summarise impact on a simple dashboard. The chart below shows indexed metrics (100 = current state) so you can imagine how your own numbers would move.
Flow of value creation
Use cases vary, but the business journey often follows a rhythm. The map below highlights the stakeholder conversations and checkpoints we cover from first coffee to steady state.
What every engagement includes
No matter the use case, you get transparent change management, training, and go-live support.
Discovery with your people
Workshops capture pain points and constraints from finance, operations, IT, and compliance. We document “day in the life” stories so success criteria stay grounded.
Co-build & pilot
We build side-by-side with your SMEs. Shadowing and playbacks ensure everyone understands how the automation behaves before scaling.
Upskill & handoff
Runbooks, training sessions, and optional support windows help your team take ownership confidently—no black boxes left behind.
FAQ: What-if questions we hear
Ready for a guided working session?
Bring one manual workflow. We will map the current state, identify automation candidates, and sketch guardrails in under 90 minutes.
Book a discovery session