Digital transformation: −30% in costs

Situation

A logistics company with 150 staff and ₽200M in annual revenue ran everything in Excel and counted by hand. Documents carried errors in 8% of operations, orders stalled in queues, and manual work throttled growth — the company had hit a glass ceiling.

Diagnostic and approach

We saw the root cause quickly: without digital infrastructure, the company had nowhere to grow. People were drowning in paperwork instead of building the business; errors hit the bottom line and drove customers away. Scaling by hand was simply not an option.

The conclusion was self-evident: deploy a warehouse management system (WMS) and stitch it into accounting.

Solution

WMS selection and rollout

We chose a system fit to the real requirements and budget — neither the most expensive nor the cheapest. We rolled it out in two months across two phases: warehouse logistics first, then integration with accounting.

Team training

We put every employee through training — 40 hours each. That time is not cheap, but without it the system would have stayed an expensive toy rather than a working tool.

Automating routine processes

Once the system was live, we took the routine off people's hands: documents, approvals, and notifications were handled by the system. That returned 20% of the time the team had previously spent on administration.

Outcome

Over eight months costs fell 30% — automation and order in the documents did their work. Document errors dropped from 8% to 1.2%, and order processing accelerated from five days to four. ROI reached 240% a year: the system cost ₽2M, and the annual impact was ₽6.8M. In that shape the company was acquired — on terms that favored it.

We run projects like this as part of our work on reducing operational costs.