Five times its cost, measured not claimed
A production floor was retyping the same handful of story write-ups every day. We replaced the typing with a Chrome extension, and built the licensing portal that proves what it saved.
Figures come from the licensing portal's own usage tracking. Specific volumes and rates are the client's and aren't published here.
The problem
Technicians on the production floor write the same story entries over and over in NetSuite — bug fixes, investigations, status updates. Each one takes two to three minutes to type, and the wording drifts between people, which makes the records harder to search later.
The task is small. Repeated across a team, every day, it stops being small.
What we built
A Chrome extension that watches the story field and suggests matching templates as the technician types. Keyword matching happens in real time; Tab completes the suggestion; arrow keys and Enter move through the list. The technician never leaves the keyboard.
Behind it sits an admin portal that issues and manages licences — per technician, per location, per department — with expiry handling, revocation, and reissue separated so a lost key doesn't mean a lost seat. The portal also counts every template insert as it happens, which is what makes the numbers above verifiable rather than claimed.
How the return is calculated
The multiple matters less than the method behind it, so here's the method in full:
- Usage is a direct count. The extension logs every template insert to the portal as it happens — no sampling, no self-reporting. The report can be pulled at any time and re-verified independently.
- Time saved is valued conservatively. Each insert is credited at the low end of how long that write-up actually takes to type by hand, not the average and not the best case.
- Labour value uses the client's own rate, not an industry benchmark — so the result reflects their floor rather than a flattering national figure.
- Cost is the real invoice, not list price. Licences issued free of charge still count toward the savings while contributing nothing to what's billed, which pushes the multiple down rather than up.
Every one of those choices was made in the direction that makes the number smaller. The return still lands at roughly five times what the client pays for it.
Built to grow sideways
Licences are modelled per technician, per location, and per department from the beginning, with expiry, revocation, and reissue kept as separate operations. Adding a second site is a configuration change rather than a data migration — which is the difference between a tool that fits one office and a tool a business can standardise on.
Have a task your team repeats every day?
That's usually where the cheapest wins are. Tell us what it is and we'll tell you whether it's worth automating.