Real problems, real outcomes.
Not anonymized success theater. These are the actual situations and what I did. Where I don't have an exact number, I say so instead of making one up.
Job cost reports in Epicor Kinetic didn't match reality. Actual costs consistently ran higher than what the system showed, and nobody could say exactly why, some mix of outdated labor rates in the routing, burden rates that hadn't been touched in years, and a BAQ feeding the cost report that was silently excluding a chunk of material transactions. Production planning was making decisions off numbers everyone privately knew were wrong.
Went through the cost rollup logic module by module instead of patching the symptom. Rebuilt the BAQ to correctly capture every material transaction type it was missing, updated labor and burden rates to reflect what things actually cost on the floor, and set up a recurring BPM check that flags a job when its actual cost drifts too far from its estimate, so the next time something's wrong, it surfaces in days, not during a year-end margin review.
Job cost accuracy improved noticeably and has held since. Production planning stopped mentally discounting the ERP numbers and started using the system as intended.
A recurring approval step in Epicor Kinetic had gotten slow enough that people stopped using the built-in workflow and started routing it over email instead. The official system of record no longer reflected what was actually happening, approvals had no audit trail, and things occasionally fell through the cracks because an email got buried instead of sitting in a queue.
Rebuilt the approval as a proper BPM directly in Kinetic, routing to the right person automatically based on the actual approval logic already in use, with email notifications so it didn't require anyone to babysit a screen, and an escalation path if something sat untouched too long. The goal wasn't more process, it was making the correct path faster than the workaround, so people would actually use it.
Approval time dropped and the email workaround stopped happening, because there was no longer a reason to reach for it. Everything now has an actual audit trail instead of a scattered email thread.
A friend who builds websites for construction and B2C companies wanted to offer his own clients something better than a contact form that dumped every inbound lead into one inbox, good and bad, with no sorting and no fast first response.
Showed him how to build a lead-intake automation using Claude: classify each inbound lead against the criteria that actually matter for that kind of business, draft a first-pass reply for the ones worth pursuing, and route dead-end inquiries out of the main inbox instead of mixing them in. Nothing sends without a human able to see it first, this was about giving him a real tool to offer, not a black box he couldn't explain to his own clients.
He now has a lead-automation setup he understands well enough to install and explain to his own clients directly, not something he has to come back to me for every time.
Got a similar problem?
Tell me what's going on. I'll tell you whether I've seen it before and what it would take to fix it.
Tell me what's broken