Case study
Eight tools, one platform: how HBI Australia cut manual handling by 60%
HBI Australia was running its operations across eight off-the-shelf tools. Every one of them worked. The cost was in the gaps between them, and the gaps were staffed by people re-keying.
- Client
- HBI Australia, Gold Coast
- Before
- Eight off-the-shelf tools
- After
- One operations-first platform
- Verified outcome
- 60% less manual handling
The problem was not the tools
Eight off-the-shelf products, each doing the job it was bought for. That is worth saying first, because the instinct on seeing eight tools is that somebody bought badly. They had not. Each tool was a reasonable answer to the question it was bought to answer.
What nobody had bought was the thing that joins them. So the joins were people: exporting from one system, typing into the next, keeping a mental model of which job was at which stage, and answering the question "where is that up to" by opening several screens and reconstructing it.
That is the cost that does not appear on any invoice. No line item says double-handling. It shows up as a team that is busy without moving, and as a manager who finds out about a problem later than they should have.
What we built
One operations-first platform, built around how the business actually runs rather than around what any one tool could already do. Job tracking and reporting were unified into it, so a job's status is a fact the system holds rather than something a person assembles.
Microsoft 365 and SharePoint were integrated, not replaced. That is the standing rule on this kind of work: where what you already own fits, it gets configured properly and connected. Replacing a working platform to solve a joining problem spends money and buys risk.
The eight tools became one place where the work lives, with real-time visibility across the team as a consequence of that rather than as a separate reporting project bolted on afterwards.
The outcome
60% less manual handling. That figure is the client's, it is the one published against this work, and it is the only number on this page for that reason. Alongside it: cleaner workflows, faster turnaround, and a team that can see the state of the operation without asking each other.
We have not published the tool names, the volumes or the commercial detail. Those are HBI's, not ours to spend.
What generalises
If your operation runs across a handful of capable products and the friction is all at the boundaries, the answer usually is not another product. It is owning the lifecycle that crosses them. That is the same conclusion we reached in a very different industry, and the pattern held.
Common questions
- Did HBI have to give up Microsoft 365?
- No. Microsoft 365 and SharePoint were integrated into the platform rather than replaced. Where what you already own fits, it should stay.
- Is 60% less manual handling typical?
- It is the verified figure for this build, not a promise for the next one. What is typical is the shape: the biggest gains come from the boundaries between systems, because that is where the manual work was hiding.
- Why not just buy a ninth tool?
- Because the problem was not a missing capability. Every stage already had a product. What was missing was something owning the process that ran across them, and no ninth product does that for you.
- How would this start for us?
- By mapping your workflow and finding the boundary that costs the most today. That one gets automated first, so it pays for what comes next.