The challenge
Nordwerk had grown from 120 to 310 people in four years. Revenue followed, cash did not. An order passed through eleven hands before an invoice went out, and nobody could say where the 21 days went.
The board had budgeted a new ERP system. Our job was to find out whether it was actually the answer.
What we did
In week one we followed 40 real orders from first email to paid invoice. Three hand-offs accounted for nine of the 21 days, and none of them were caused by software.
We redesigned order intake around a single owner, moved credit checks to the start instead of the end and automated invoice creation with the system Nordwerk already had.
The result
After eleven weeks, median lead time was down to 13 days. € 2.1M of working capital was released and the ERP project was cancelled. The order team now runs the process and its weekly review without us.
“They found in five days what we had been discussing for two years.”
Katrin Wolff
CFO, Nordwerk
