How we saved 14 hours a week in a warehouse in Radom
It started with Andrzej, the owner of the Art-Papier warehouse in Radom, stopping sleeping soundly. His company was growing, but instead of planning development, he spent afternoons looking for lost invoices and correcting errors in orders. We saw it in black and white: chaos was eating up his margins and time for his family.
Mess that cost real money
The Art-Papier warehouse has been operating in Radom since 2016 and for a long time it did great on the owner's pure intuition. However, at a scale of 156 regular customers, the old method of 'everything in my head' stopped working. When we visited their office for the first time, Andrzej showed us a desk on which there were 47 undescribed invoices from suppliers. No one knew which were paid and which were waiting for the deadline. This caused downtime in deliveries because suppliers blocked shipments of goods due to arrears of several thousand PLN, which Andrzej simply forgot about.
Process analysis took us 4 business days. We checked the facts, not the employees' promises. We calculated that Ms. Beata from accounting spends an average of 3 hours a day rewriting data from paper delivery notes into the computer. This was a classic example of waste. At the same time, warehouse workers waited for printouts, smoking cigarettes and generating fixed costs without any benefit to the company. We saw it in black and white: the company was losing the potential for development because it drowned in papers.
How did we find those 14 hours?
Our method was simple: a stopwatch in hand and observation. For two days we accompanied employees in their daily tasks. It turned out that most of the time escapes through communication between the office and the warehouse. The warehouse worker, Mr. Jurek, had to travel 85 meters every time a client wanted to change the amount of ordered goods at the last minute. He did this about 19 times a day. That's almost an hour and a half of walking and talking alone, which brought nothing to the company's margin.
The second 'time thief' was the complaint process. Each return from a customer took an average of 54 minutes of office handling. You had to find the original invoice in the archives, make a copy, call the courier and manually enter the correction. On a weekly scale, the warehouse had about 11 such cases. We implemented a simple shared folder and gave permissions to edit stock levels in real time. Without unnecessary talk, the time for handling a complaint dropped to 14 minutes per report.
We checked facts, not promises. It turned out that employees lose 3 hours a day just walking between desks.
Solutions that don't hurt the wallet
Most consulting firms would start by persuading Andrzej to get an ERP system for 50,000 PLN. At Orzeł Business Strategy, we know that small companies from Radom do not have such budgets to start with. Instead, we used free tools that Andrzej already had in his office suite but didn't use. We created a simple job instruction for each of the 5 employees. Everyone got a clear list: what they do at 8:00 AM, what at 12:00 PM, and what before leaving for home. Simple rules, better results.
The next step was to train the team in handling foreign customers. Andrzej wanted to sell to Germany but was afraid of the language barrier and other regulations. We prepared 7 ready message templates in German and English, which handle 92% of typical questions from contractors. Thanks to this, the office stopped panicking when a number with the prefix +49 appeared on the screen. Implementation costs amounted to less than one monthly lease for a delivery truck.
Specific results after 3 months
Today, three months after our intervention, the numbers speak for themselves. Andrzej recovered 14.2 hours a week, which he now spends on negotiations with new suppliers from the Czech Republic. The company handled 187 orders last month without a single mistake in the assortment. Previously, errors happened in every tenth package. This is not only savings on couriers, but above all holy peace and a better opinion in Google, which jumped from 4.1 to 4.7 with 47 new reviews.
The most important change, however, occurred in the heads of the team. Employees stopped being afraid of control because the processes are now clear. They know that if they perform their tasks according to the new schedule, they will leave work at 4:00 PM sharp. Andrzej stopped being a 'firefighter' extinguishing fires in the office and became a company owner. We are just preparing an entry strategy for the Czech market for him, because thanks to the released time he finally has the resources to realistically think about it. If you want similar effects, book a 20-minute consultation with our analyst.
Andrzej stopped being a firefighter extinguishing fires and became a real company owner who has time for development.
