At a glance
A global medical equipment manufacturer with more than 50,000 employees walked WIQ through two workflows spanning five teams. Four teams handled receiving, quality assurance, packaging, and stock. An equipment-service team handled replacement records.
Before WIQ
- Receiving orders passed through goods receipt, quality assurance, packaging, and stock, with more than 600 orders a day crossing four teams.
- Existing automation connections could reach equipment records, but specialists still had to read free-text service notes to match original and replacement serial numbers.
- No single team owned either receiving or equipment replacement end to end.
WIQ used those walkthroughs to scope discovery and agent development across the five teams. The company would select which processes to automate after reviewing the discovery findings.
The operating workload
- receiving orders per day
- 600+
- people handling receiving
- 10–12
- equipment replacements per day
- 20
- manual handling per replacement
- 7 min
- equipment replacements per year
- 5,000
- estimated annual replacement-handling workload
- 580 hrs
Reported operating volume
Across four teams
Reading notes and matching records
Annualized at 250 working days
WIQ’s business case uses a $45 hourly labor cost and 250 working days per year. At 12 receiving staff working 6.5 hours a day, receiving accounts for 19,500 annual hours. Equipment replacement adds roughly 580 hours.
That puts annual manual processing cost at roughly $900,000, or about $760,000 with 10 receiving staff. This is the cost of the current work; the slides do not report a measured reduction.
Receiving handoffs and replacement records
Receiving-to-stock crosses goods receipt, quality assurance, packaging, and stock. WIQ’s plan is to observe the work across those teams before defining which steps an agent would handle.
The customer had already built the connections and sessions for equipment replacement in its automation platform. Matching records still required a specialist to read free-text service notes and identify which serial number had replaced which. Discovery would capture how specialists make that decision before defining the agent’s record-update rules.
From the first agents to a broader program
- processes in the company’s inventory
- 100+
Existing customer inventory
The company already had more than 100 processes in its mining inventory. WIQ’s scope covers discovery across the five teams, an opportunity map, and a prioritized automation plan. The selected workflows could extend beyond receiving and equipment replacement.
The pilot would deliver agents in the company’s test environment for its subject-matter experts to operate.
The longer-term proposal covers multiple processes across the participating teams, with subsequent agents selected from the opportunity map. Discovery would establish the workload and automation potential across that broader scope.
