Engagement patterns from 3 industries

In our consulting practice we keep seeing that industry-specific engagements look very different on the surface, but there's a common layer that stays the same across every one of them. We wrote this piece to show the typical pattern from our 3 industries — and the thing they all share.

1. Manufacturing — WMS + ERP integration

Typical engagement description

Mid-sized manufacturer (50-500 staff, 1-5 plants) already runs a WMS (Warehouse Management System) at the warehouse layer, and has an ERP (typically SAP, Microsoft Dynamics) on the finance side. The two systems aren't tied together in real time — the warehouse sends monthly Excel to finance, finance sends monthly orders to procurement, procurement uploads monthly PDFs to the WMS. Error rate: 7-12% (stock-outs, over-ordering, billing disputes).

The engagement

14 business days on average. Kick-off → mapping audit (3 days, since the two systems' data models usually diverge) → ADRs (1 day) → connector implementation (5 days) → sandbox testing (2 days) → pilot in one warehouse (1 day) → cutover (1 day) → 1-week hyper-care.

What we ship

Bidirectional sync: SKU master, stock state, in/out movements, plus the financials side (invoice draft, invoice paid, exception ticket). Real-time via webhooks, with nightly full-sync validation.

Typical metric improvement

Error rate drops from 7-12% to 0.5-1.5%. Monthly reconciliation drops from 8-12 work-hours to 1 work-hour. ROI within 6-10 months.

2. Professional services — timesheet + invoicing

Typical engagement description

Law firm, engineering firm, accounting firm (15-80 staff). They track time in Excel or a simple app (Toggl, Clockify), but billing runs in a separate system. Invoices get written once a month when the partner looks over what the team did, makes ad-hoc decisions on what can/can't be billed to the client. Average customer-billable-but-not-billed time is 18-25%.

The engagement

22 business days on average (longer because more stakeholder alignment needed). Kick-off → current process audit (4 days) → ADRs (2 days) → new timesheet app integration (8 days) → invoicing config (4 days) → 1-week parallel-run → cutover.

What we ship

Integration between the existing timesheet app and the new (or existing) invoicing system. A rules engine that automates billable / non-billable / write-off decisions at 80% precision (the 20% stay under the partner's eye).

Typical metric improvement

Unbilled time drops from 18-25% to 4-7%. The partner saves 4-6 hours per week on billing prep. ROI within 4-6 months.

3. E-commerce — storefront + checkout optimisation

Typical engagement description

Mid-sized e-com (5-50M EUR annual revenue). On Magento, Shopware, or a custom platform. Checkout conversion is 1.2-2.1% (below industry average), with the main leak point at step 2-3 of checkout (usually shipping selection or payment add).

The engagement

18 business days on average. Kick-off → Hotjar/Plausible data audit (2 days) → checkout redesign workshop (1 day) → ADRs (1 day) → new checkout implementation (7 days) → A/B test setup (1 day) → 4-week A/B test → result review and cutover.

What we ship

A new checkout flow, usually compressed from 5-7 steps to 3 steps. New payment providers (Stripe, Klarna, local BNPL). Mobile-first design. An A/B test frame for long-term continued optimisation.

Typical metric improvement

Checkout conversion rises from 1.2-2.1% to 2.4-3.6%. Mobile conversion rises from 0.8% to 2.1%. ROI within 2-4 months (because e-com traffic is high).

The common layer

What's common in all 3 industries, present in every engagement:

Auth

Login and the permission model is the opening block everywhere. For a new system we usually drop in SSO (Microsoft Azure AD, Google Workspace, or Auth0). Scopes are role-based (admin / user / read-only). This is typically 1-2 days of work, but it has to come first — every further feature stands on top of it.

Audit

Every state change is audited. Who, when, what they changed, and (ideally) why. This is not optional. In manufacturing it's quality compliance (ISO 9001), in prof. services it's partner accounting, in e-com it's refund dispute handling. The audit table is always the 2nd-3rd most-written table in the system — worth designing well from the start (indexes, partition strategy).

The takeaway

Industry-specific on the surface, common at the foundation. Anyone running a consulting firm and building auth + audit from zero again and again will be outrun by time. We use our own starters for the auth and audit layer in Consulting OS templates, and every new engagement starts day 1 with a working skeleton. That's how the actual business logic fits into 10 days.