Overview
Schupan is one of the largest aluminium recyclers in North America, operating across multiple facilities with complex materials flows and financial reporting requirements. Like many manufacturers, their reporting infrastructure had grown organically — effective enough, but inefficient by design. A single month-end report was consuming more than two full days of a senior accountant's time. Every month.
The challenge
Schupan's most critical financial consolidation report required manually pulling data from multiple systems, reconciling mismatched formats, and building a summary spreadsheet from scratch. The accountant who owned this process had done it hundreds of times — which meant the knowledge lived entirely in one person's head. There was no documentation, no backup, and no obvious path to automation without a major systems overhaul.
“Schupan didn’t need new AI systems; they needed their existing tools to work smarter. Our role was to translate the complexity of their operations into automations that fit their world and how their teams actually work.”
What we did
We came in for a Strategy Sprint to understand the full picture — not just the report, but the systems, formats, and edge cases that made it hard. What we found was that the underlying data was cleaner than it appeared. The 20 hours weren't about complexity; they were about friction. Unnecessary friction that could be eliminated without touching the core systems.
Mapped the full month-end reporting workflow step by step, documenting every data source, format conversion, and manual judgment call.
Identified that 80% of the time was consumed by three repeatable, automatable steps — data extraction, format normalisation, and consolidation logic.
Built lightweight Azure automations that run on a schedule, pulling from existing systems without requiring any changes to upstream data sources.
Replaced the manual spreadsheet process with a report that generates in under 10 seconds and arrives in the accountant's inbox automatically.
Documented the system end-to-end so Schupan's internal team can maintain and extend it without Substantial involvement.
The results
20 hours → 10 seconds, every month
The report that consumed two full working days now runs automatically and completes in under 10 seconds.
Single point of failure eliminated
The process is now documented, automated, and maintainable by any member of the finance team — not dependent on one person's institutional knowledge.
No systems overhaul required
Everything was built inside Schupan's existing Azure environment. No new software licenses, no migration, no disruption to existing workflows.
Appetite for more
The success on this report created immediate demand to apply the same approach to three additional reporting workflows identified during the sprint.