Digital Transformation Consultant Manchester

Sales Process Audit Uncovers the Reason DSO Was Running 15 Days Over Target

A North West manufacturer had D365 Finance and Operations live but their sales and order-to-cash process was still largely manual. Days Sales Outstanding was sitting well above target and the sales team was spending a disproportionate amount of time on order admin rather than with customers. Nobody had taken a proper look at where the time was actually going.

We ran a two-day commercial process audit, mapping every step from quote through to cash receipt. What came out was a clear picture of where the bottlenecks lived: order confirmations being re-entered manually rather than flowing from the CRM into D365, credit approvals happening over email and occasionally getting lost, and invoices going out days late because the handoff between sales and finance was informal. The volume of manual steps was compressing cash flow at each stage.

We rebuilt the order processing workflow inside D365, connected the credit management module so approvals happened within the system, and configured automated invoice dispatch on goods receipt confirmation. We also ran training for both the sales and finance teams on the new flow so the workarounds did not creep back in. Within two months, DSO had dropped by around 12 days and the sales team had reclaimed several hours a week they had been spending on chasing and re-keying.

Pricing Process Audit Finds Sales Team Spending Three Hours a Week on Manual Competitor Checks Before Every Proposal

A Manchester-based marketing and retail business noticed their sales team was consistently slow to get proposals out. Deals that should have turned around in a day were taking three or four. When we sat down with the team to understand the process, the issue was straightforward: before pricing anything, sales reps were manually checking competitor sites, asking colleagues what they had heard recently, and pulling together their own informal picture of where the market sat. It was taking roughly three hours per proposal, and the information was inconsistent from rep to rep.

We mapped the full commercial workflow in a half-day session, identified the competitor research and pricing review steps as the biggest recoverable time sink, and built a weekly n8n workflow to handle it. The workflow pulls current competitor pricing and positioning using Perplexity, runs it through Claude to produce a structured market briefing with pricing signals, and delivers it to the team every Monday morning. Sales reps now arrive at the week with the competitive context already in front of them. Proposal turnaround dropped from three to four days down to same-day for standard deals, and pricing decisions became more consistent across the team.