ClientA global mining and aggregates equipment manufacturer
SprintAn 8 to 10 week sprint
Fieldwork27 interviews across 3 regions
Aftermarket and Service Business
Four to ten months to return a part
Distributors were sitting on stock they could not return. When they did try, the process ran on email and spreadsheets and took four to ten months. Inside the company, nobody owned the whole picture.
27
Interviews: 9 distributors and 18 internal stakeholders across three regions
74 hours
Manual effort per return identified as removable, worth about €200k a year. Indicative, to be validated
9 months
Estimated payback on the digitisation case, at €150k capital and €10k running cost
A note on sourcing. Every figure here comes from a SprintlyWorks client engagement. Clients are described, never named. Where a figure is identified, modelled or indicative rather than banked, the line says so.
01
The problem
Returns were split across distribution managers, sales support, availability management, third party warehouses and finance, in three regions. No single person could describe how the process worked end to end. Internal staff said as much in their own words: what is returnable and what is not, even we do not know.
That is why the question could not be answered from inside. Establishing what actually happens meant candid conversations with the distributors about the client’s own policy, which is not a conversation an internal team can run about itself.
02
What the sprint set out to do
Map the region-specific policy gaps from distributor behaviour and from competitor policies. Diagnose the current process end to end and find the internal bottlenecks. Quantify the time each step actually takes. Then set out a prioritised list of what to fix, before anyone committed to building a solution.
It was scoped as a pre-study, and it ended as one: a diagnostic, four prioritised improvement areas, and a plan for the sprint that would design the future state. Every figure it produced is modelled, and the deck labels them so.
Hours per return, by function
Where the time goes, and where automation does not help
Estimated effort per return today against effort after automation. All columns estimated, to be validated.
| Function | Now | After | Saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operational excellence | 48 | 0 | 48 |
| Warehouse | 80 | 80 | 0 |
| Sales support | 20 | 8 | 12 |
| Finance, credit | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| Distribution manager | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| Email loops and rechecks | 4 | 1 | 3 |
How to read this → The warehouse row saves nothing, because quality inspection stays manual. That is the row that makes the rest of the table credible: 74 hours come out of a 164 hour process, and the largest single block of time is untouched by the fix being proposed.
SprintlyWorks analysis
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