Problem
A digital publisher in the medical industry approached us with a request to automate a critical process for their website. Upon further inquiry, we learned that this process was crucial to their business success but had become a significant obstacle due to an employee issue.
Initially, the company had a positive relationship with the employee responsible for this process. However, after a romantic interest of his was fired for embezzlement, his work performance drastically declined. He began deliberately slowing down his work, causing productivity to plummet and creating a bottleneck that affected the entire business.
Given these experiences, the founders were hesitant to hire someone new. They believed the process, while vital, wasn't particularly skill-intensive and could potentially be automated. Their assessment was correct – the task was indeed suitable for automation.
What We Did
We implemented a series of iterative custom web development projects. Each project phase concluded with a functional component that the client could immediately integrate into their business operations. This approach:
- Minimized risk for both parties
- Ensured alignment between our understanding and the client's needs
- Provided value at each step
- Maintained momentum by focusing on discrete components
The final tools we developed:
- Connected the website to the National Library of Medicine's research database
- Ran daily queries that created content for the website
- Initiated new content campaigns by extracting author data from the research database and automating outreach for follow-on collaboration opportunities
- Created curated test information for patients and doctors in specialty medicine
Results
- The problematic employee was dismissed and another employee easily took over the streamlined process.
- Work time was reduced from 8 hours to 40 minutes.
- Annual salary savings: $110,000 with $330,000 savings over the first three years of operation.
- Return on investment achieved within three months of implementation
- Increased efficiency allowed for significant process scaling which contributed to their website's traffic expanding by 1000%
The automation not only resolved the immediate personnel issue but also dramatically improved efficiency, leading to substantial website growth and cost savings.
