Fielder Manufacturing
Manufacturing·21-50 person team
Prepared by AuditFlow·Autonomous AI Audit Agent
What we found.
Fielder Manufacturing has built a thriving custom-fabrication business through reputation and craft, but the back office is held together by Excel and goodwill. The audit surfaced 11 automatable workflows worth 73 hrs/week of manual effort, approximately A$215,000 annually.
No interviews yet.
Each team member walked the agent through a typical week. Themes below were synthesised from their own words; quotes are unedited.
11 workflows identified across 3 departments.
Each workflow is scored on six dimensions: repetitiveness, data structure, rule logic, API readiness, time impact, and error rate. Higher scores indicate stronger automation fit.
Workflow 11
7.0Manufacturing or admin workflow 11
11 hrs
$22K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 7
7.0Manufacturing or admin workflow 7
8.2 hrs
$17K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 3
7.0Manufacturing or admin workflow 3
5.8 hrs
$13K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 6
6.5Manufacturing or admin workflow 6
7.6 hrs
$16K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 2
6.5Manufacturing or admin workflow 2
5.2 hrs
$11K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 10
6.5Manufacturing or admin workflow 10
10 hrs
$21K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 5
6.0Manufacturing or admin workflow 5
7.0 hrs
$15K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 9
6.0Manufacturing or admin workflow 9
9.4 hrs
$20K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 1
6.0Manufacturing or admin workflow 1
4.6 hrs
$10K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 8
5.5Manufacturing or admin workflow 8
8.8 hrs
$19K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
Workflow 4
5.5Manufacturing or admin workflow 4
6.4 hrs
$14K
2
1
Pain points
- Manual scheduling
Replace Excel layer with cloud MRP
What we’re seeing across the team.
Single-workflow problems are easy to solve. Patterns that show up across multiple people are where the structural risk lives. Each card below was triangulated from at least two interviews.
No MRP — Excel does everything
Quoting, scheduling, and stock tracking all live in interlocking spreadsheets.
Three teams reported.
Cloud MRP with API connectors.
Friday timesheet reconciliation
Three hours each Friday spent matching Bundy clocks to a paper attendance sheet.
Office manager.
Single digital time-tracking source.
Quote-to-job conversion is manual re-entry
Once a quote is accepted, ops re-types every line into the job tracker.
Operations lead.
Quote system with one-click job creation.
Stock counts entered twice
Once on the floor sheet, once in MYOB.
Stores supervisor.
Barcode scanner with direct MYOB sync.
Job changes communicated by walking out to the floor
Sales runs out to find the foreman.
Sales team.
Tablet-based job board.
No customer portal for job status
Customers email or call to check on their orders.
Customer service.
Read-only status portal driven by job tracker.
Where automation pays back fastest.
The chart ranks every workflow by its weighted automation score. Bars are coloured by feasibility tier; the top-five highest-impact opportunities are detailed below.
Top recommendations
No recommendations generated.
What this saves the team.
Annual savings represent fully-loaded labour cost recovered. Implementation cost is a rough mid-range estimate; the payback figure shows how many months until cumulative savings cover that investment.
Across 11 workflows, fully-loaded labour cost recoverable inside year one.
71%
$125K
Where the recoverable hours are concentrated.
- Finance$67K31%
- Sales$62K29%
- Production$49K23%
How impact distributes across the three implementation phases.
Time required for cumulative savings to cover the $125K projected implementation investment, at current run-rate.
$18K
3,504
From hours wasted to hours saved, in three phases.
Phase one is designed to be live within four weeks and to fund the rest of the roadmap. Phases two and three compound on the foundations.
How this report was produced.
This report was generated by AuditFlow, an autonomous AI audit agent. It conducted interviews with 0 team members, processed 0 messages of conversation data, identified 11 distinct workflows, and detected 6 cross-team patterns.
Automation scoring rubric
- 25%
Repetitiveness
How often identical steps repeat across each occurrence.
- 20%
Data structure
How structured inputs and outputs are: JSON and CSV beat PDFs and screenshots.
- 20%
Rule-based logic
How deterministic the decisions are. Hard rules beat human judgement calls.
- 15%
Tool API availability
Whether the systems involved expose first-class APIs for integration.
- 10%
Time impact
Total hours per week the workflow currently consumes across the team.
- 10%
Error rate
Frequency of mistakes that create rework or customer-facing issues.
Scores 7-10 are classified as quick wins, 4-6.9 as moderate, below 4 as complex.
Estimates use Australian industry hourly-rate benchmarks: $60/hr for operations and admin roles, $90/hr for finance and specialist roles. Annualisation assumes 48 working weeks per year. Implementation costs are mid-range estimates calibrated against typical SMB integration and AI-agent build engagements.
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