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A chip plant asked ABM for a written procedure for every machine it maintains. Each one is a step by step guide a technician follows, and each one needs a matching test that proves the technician can do the job.

A writer took about four hours to get one procedure to a first draft, then about half an hour more to make the test. The plan needed thousands of documents.

Every document started from a blank page, and that is where the hours went.

Apparel Redefined prints and embroiders clothing in Chicago. Blank garments arrive from suppliers by the carton. Before anything can be printed, someone has to work out which customer order a carton belongs to.

That was the hard part. The box carries a tracking number from the carrier. NOMOS, the system that runs their orders, had never known which tracking number belonged to which order, so a receiver worked it out by hand. In January I found they got it right on the first try about half the time.

When it went wrong the box waited. The usual fix was to hold every carton in a group until all of them landed, open them, and sort garments by color and size until the pile matched the paperwork. That took between one and five hours.

One order in ten then sat a week or more before anyone could start making it. In the worst week it was more than half of them. That happened in 2023, again in 2024, and again in 2025. Nobody had put a cost on it, because it showed up as delay and never as a bill.

Apparel Redefined prints and embroiders clothing in Chicago. Sales closes deals in Zoho, their sales system, and each closed deal becomes an invoice in QuickBooks.

Those invoices arrived blank. Every line was marked as a general service, with no product and no sales channel. Someone had to open each one and code it by hand, and the rules for how to code it lived in one head: their accountant's.

The owners also wanted to see which kinds of work make money: screen print, embroidery, and the rest. Blank invoices could not tell them. Almost none of the revenue carried the kind of work on it.

Two quieter problems sat underneath. When a deal was closed twice, the order got made twice, six times in fourteen months. And when the handoff to the order system failed, it failed without telling anyone.