By Linda Mayes, Regional President, Palmetto Technology Group
The most expensive work in a small business is usually the work nobody invoices for, which is why it survives for years without anyone questioning it. At Greenville Office Supply the job in question was competitor pricing, and it belonged to Keith Hagerty, the Director of IT. Every week he downloaded eleven files, each holding twenty-five to thirty thousand items, combined them, matched their part numbers against his own, checked the units of measure lined up and reformatted everything into a schema his system could ingest. Six hours, give or take. He is also the person responsible for keeping the entire network running.
Why an Independent Has to Do This at All
Greenville Office Supply has been family-owned since 1968, employs fifty to sixty people in the Upstate of South Carolina, and sells into seven divisions covering everything from furniture and janitorial to promotional products and breakroom supplies. It also competes directly with Amazon and Staples, which is where the pricing job comes from. Personal service wins plenty of business, and Keith is proud of it, but he is clear-eyed about the limits: “we also understand that we need to remain competitive in the market.” A client who finds a better price is two clicks from taking it, and if enough of them do, the business stops existing.
The Work Expired While He Was Doing It
What makes manual price matching worse than most repetitive jobs is that it goes stale as you do it. Competitors move their numbers constantly, so the file Keith spent his morning building was not necessarily accurate by the time he finished it. He describes the futility directly: “you can spend hours and days doing this and by the time you’re done the competitors change their price again.” That is the trap. The slower the process, the less the output is worth, and the more of it you have to do.
He Had Already Tried to Fix It Himself
This is the part most IT managers will recognize. Keith knew what he wanted, knew roughly how it should work, and knew the tool existed, because Power Automate was sitting inside the Microsoft license Greenville Office Supply was already paying for. So he sat down and tried to build it. “I couldn’t get it to do what I needed to do and this was probably six months or a year ago and I kinda gave up.” He resigned himself to the manual version and carried on, which is how most of these stories quietly end.
It Started as a Passing Comment
The turning point had nothing to do with a business case. Keith was on a call with his COO and Reed from PTG about a completely unrelated issue when he mentioned the pain point, and Reed stopped him and asked him to explain it. By the end of that call he had a promise to get someone in touch; a couple of hours later a PTG engineer emailed asking him to walk through the process. Keith sent screenshots, they traded detail for about a week, and then PTG shared a screen and showed him what they had built.
Automation He Could Still Stop
Keith had one condition, and it is the one most people have without saying it out loud. He wanted to keep control, so he asked for what he called waypoints: “I could approve, yes, that’s correct, move to the next step.” PTG said they could add a checkpoint pretty much wherever he wanted. On the second call they ran the whole thing live so he could watch it work and hit approve himself, and “about ten seconds later an email popped up in my email with the finished product for me to review.”
Six Hours, Down to Five Minutes
Keith gave the numbers himself. The job took roughly six hours by hand; it now takes five to ten minutes, and all of that is review rather than work. The process runs automatically and lands in his inbox at 8:33 or 8:34 every Tuesday morning. What he actually recovered is not really the hours, it is his Tuesdays, which now go on client pricing and the website migration instead of crunching data. As he puts it, “that for me is at least a half a day of time that I now have recovered.” There was no additional product to buy, because it was built inside the Microsoft suite the business already paid for, and GOS has since started a second project with PTG around Copilot.
Key Takeaways
- Manual work is not free just because nobody invoices for it. Keith Hagerty calls tedious and time consuming a profit killer.
- The tool was already paid for. Power Automate sat inside the existing Microsoft license the whole time.
- Trying and failing is normal. A technical Director of IT shelved this for months before a specialist team scoped and built it in a week of emails and two calls.
- Automation does not have to mean losing control. Approval waypoints mean nothing reaches the pricing system without a human yes.
- The project started as a passing comment on a call about something else, which is an argument for the relationship, not the ticket queue.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was Greenville Office Supply’s problem before working with PTG?
Keith Hagerty, their Director of IT, was manually compiling competitor pricing every week: eleven separate files, twenty-five to thirty thousand items in each, downloaded one at a time, combined, matched against GOS part numbers and reformatted so the pricing system could ingest them. It took roughly six hours a week.
Why does an independent office supplier need to track competitor prices at all?
Greenville Office Supply competes directly with big box retailers like Amazon and Staples. As Keith puts it, they have “a business model that allows us to be competitive with those big box retailers,” but that only holds if the pricing does. A client who finds a substantially better price elsewhere is a couple of clicks from taking their business there.
What did PTG actually build?
An automated process in Microsoft Power Automate that pulls the competitor files, combines and reformats them, and emails Keith a finished file for review. It includes approval checkpoints, which Keith calls waypoints, so the process pauses and waits for his sign-off before moving on.
Did it require buying new software?
No. In Keith’s words, “this was something that was achieved inside the Microsoft product that we already pay for. So there wasn’t an investment that we had to make for an additional piece.” The capability was already inside the license Greenville Office Supply held.
How long did the project take?
About a week of emails and screenshots to scope it, then two Teams calls: one where PTG demonstrated what they had built and took Keith’s feedback, and a second to run a live dry run. Keith had previously spent six months to a year trying to build it himself before giving up.
What are the results?
The weekly job went from roughly six hours of manual work to five or ten minutes of review. The process runs automatically and delivers the file to Keith’s inbox at 8:33 every Tuesday. He estimates it gives him back at least half a day a week, which now goes on client pricing and a website migration.
Does Greenville Office Supply still have its own IT team?
Yes. The relationship is co-managed. Keith maintains the day-to-day network and the online retail side, and PTG holds the server hardware and the Microsoft-branded products. He describes PTG as “the bat signal that I need when there’s something that I can’t figure out.”
What is your business still doing by hand?
Most businesses have a version of Keith’s Tuesday job, and most have stopped noticing it. The tools are often already in the license. What is usually missing is a team that has built it before. Watch Keith tell it in his own words — the six hours, the attempt he gave up on, and the Tuesday morning email that replaced it.