The Monday report that used to take four hours

Challenge

Every Monday, one analyst arrived early to rebuild the weekly operations pack: six exports, three manual joins, a set of remembered corrections, and a formatting pass so the numbers looked like last week’s. Four hours, every week, for a document that was read in about ten minutes.

The real cost was not the four hours. It was that the pack could only exist once a week, so nobody asked a question on a Wednesday, and when the analyst was on holiday the pack simply did not appear.

Approach

I sat and watched a full Monday, recording every step including the ones that felt too obvious to mention — those turned out to be where the corrections lived. The exports and joins were straightforward to reproduce. The remembered corrections were the actual work: each one had to be traced back to a cause and either fixed upstream or written down as an explicit rule.

We then ran automated and manual in parallel for three weeks. Two discrepancies surfaced in that window, both in the old manual version. Nobody switched over until the two agreed three times running.

Result

The pack builds itself overnight and is waiting at 6am, with a note listing anything that looked unusual. It can also be run on demand, so the Wednesday question now gets asked. The analyst still owns the report — they read it and add a paragraph of commentary, which was always the part only they could do.