AP Automation

The firm's consultants were spending 30-40% of their time on administrative work - proposal generation, status reporting, data entry, and document review. This non-billable work was constraining growth and frustrating top performers who wanted to focus on client impact.

Specific pain points included:

• 8-12 hours per consultant per week spent on proposal writing and customization
• Manual data entry into CRM and project management systems
• Time-consuming document review and compliance checking
• Skepticism about AI - previous tools created more work than they saved
• No clear framework for evaluating automation opportunities

New Wave Associates implemented a prove-then-scale methodology:

• Opportunity Mapping (Weeks 1-3): Conducted time studies to quantify work patterns, identified top 10 automation candidates using ROI framework, assessed technical feasibility and change management risk, and selected 3 pilots with highest impact and adoption probability.
• Pilot Development (Weeks 4-10): Built AI-powered proposal generator using past winning proposals, created automated CRM data extraction from emails and meetings, implemented document review assistant for compliance checking, and co-designed with power users to ensure adoption.
• Validation & Refinement (Weeks 11-16): Ran pilots with volunteer user groups, collected feedback and usage metrics, refined tools based on real-world performance, and built business case for full deployment.
• Scale & Capability Building (Weeks 17-24): Rolled out proven tools to full organization, trained internal team to maintain and enhance automations, established innovation process for identifying future opportunities, and created governance for responsible AI use.

The AI and automation program delivered substantial capacity gains and cultural shift:

• Proposal generation time reduced by 60% while improving win rates
• CRM data quality improved by 85% through automated capture
• Document review time cut in half with maintained accuracy
• Overall administrative time decreased from 35% to 18% of consultant hours
• 95% user adoption rate - tools viewed as enabling rather than replacing consultants

The firm now has a sustainable innovation engine for identifying and deploying automation, with internal capability to continue evolving their AI toolkit as technology and business needs change.