The Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Time saved per project | 1–2 hours per Model |
| Annual volume | Hundreds of projects per year |
| Estimated annual savings | 200–400+ labour hours ($12,000–$23,000+) |
| Reliability | System used for highly secure military installations |
The Challenge
A major US-based audiovisual integration company — contracted to install AV systems in highly secure military and government facilities — was struggling with its project documentation workflow.
Each project required a detailed Excel workbook (called a “Model”) containing quotes, cost breakdowns, bills of materials, and room-by-room summaries. Large projects could involve 26 or more rooms, each requiring its own set of tabs with cross-referenced data.
The team had no efficient way to produce system design drawings and was manually copying and pasting data between tabs, building summaries by hand, and reconciling costs across dozens of rooms for every project. This process was slow, error-prone, and consumed hours of skilled labour per project.
The Solution
I was brought in and took a full-stack approach to the problem:
Design capability: Learned D-Tools (industry-standard AV design software) to enable the company to produce proper system design drawings exported to Visio.
Data pipeline: Created custom export files to bridge D-Tools output into the Excel Model format, eliminating the manual data transfer bottleneck.
Model automation: Built comprehensive Excel macros that automated the population of room tabs, cost summaries, BOMs, quotes, and accounting data across the entire workbook. What previously required manual cut-and-paste across dozens of tabs now ran with a single command.
Key Takeaway
This project demonstrates the approach I apply to every business I work with: identify the repetitive, manual processes that consume skilled workers' time, then build systems that automate them. The tools have evolved since this project — AI now makes it possible to automate far more, far faster — but the approach remains the same. Understand the operation, find the bottleneck, build the system, and give people their time back.