How Acme Manufacturing Uncovered $2.8 Million in Automation Opportunity During a Single Sprint

The Starting Point: A Maturing Program Seeking New Opportunities

Acme Corporation's automation program was three years old and had delivered significant results - 68 live automations, primarily in Finance and HR, with a well-functioning CoE team of 10 specialists. But the program had a problem that its leader, Sarah Chen (VP of Finance and Operations Automation), described plainly: 'We'd automated everything Finance and HR were willing to give us. We needed to expand into Operations and Supply Chain, but we had no relationships with those departments and no infrastructure for high-volume discovery in a manufacturing context.'

Manufacturing operations present specific intake challenges. The processes are often complex, involving physical and digital components, regulatory requirements (ISO, FDA, OSHA documentation), and equipment integration points that are unfamiliar to automation analysts from software-centric backgrounds. The business users - floor supervisors, quality engineers, supply chain planners - have limited time and limited familiarity with automation concepts. Standard intake forms designed for office processes don't translate well.

Sprint Design: Adapting to a Manufacturing Context

Sarah's team spent two weeks designing the sprint before opening it to submissions. The design choices reflected the specific challenges of a manufacturing context:

• Stakeholder mapping included operations managers, quality leads, supply chain planners, and maintenance supervisors - not just the department heads who typically engage with CoE programs.
• The intake kickoff sessions were 30 minutes rather than 60 - respecting the limited time availability of operations staff during production cycles.
• VARA's technology catalog was configured with manufacturing-specific tools: SAP S/4HANA, Aveva MES, OSIsoft PI (now AVEVA PI), and the company's quality management system.
• The sprint ran in two phases - Quality and Operations first (Weeks 1–2), Supply Chain and Finance second (Weeks 3–4) - to manage the review workload.

What the Sprint Found

The 47 submissions produced by the sprint surprised the CoE team in two ways. First, the volume was higher than expected - the combination of the structured intake format, the 30-day time boundary, and the promise of rapid feedback drove participation rates well above historical norms. Second, the pattern distribution was unusual compared to the program's Finance/HR baseline.

The Pattern Distribution in Manufacturing

The pattern breakdown from the sprint revealed the distinctive character of manufacturing automation opportunities. System Integration / API dominated at 35% - manufacturing environments typically run multiple specialized systems (ERP, MES, QMS, historian databases) that need to exchange data in real time, and many of these systems have modern APIs that enable direct integration. RPA came in second at 28%, primarily in Supply Chain (vendor portal interactions, purchase order processing) and Finance (invoice reconciliation, reporting). IDP was significant at 18% - quality documentation, certificates of conformance, material data sheets, and regulatory filings are document-heavy processes unique to manufacturing.

Process Mining was recommended for 12% of candidates - a higher proportion than typical, reflecting the complexity of manufacturing processes and the value of understanding actual execution paths before automating them. VARA flagged three candidates specifically as 'process mining before automation' - processes where the described process and the likely actual process were sufficiently different that building an automation without data-led discovery was a significant risk.

"The system-fix findings were the most valuable output of the sprint. VARA identified eight processes where the right answer was to fix the underlying system - SAP configurations, QMS updates, PI historian integrations - not to build a bot. Those eight redirections saved us from building automations that would have created maintenance burden and blocked future system improvements."

- Sarah Chen, VP Finance and Operations Automation, Acme Corporation

Converting the Pipeline: First 90-Day Results

In the 90 days following the sprint, Acme's CoE launched development on the top 12 candidates by ROI priority. Eight have been deployed to production, producing an annualized run rate of approximately $890,000 in documented efficiency savings. The remaining four are in development with expected completion in Q3 2026.

The sprint has become a quarterly practice. Sarah's team ran a second sprint in April 2026, this time focusing on three additional manufacturing sites. The process was faster to execute (design time cut in half by using the first sprint as a template) and produced comparable output. The CoE now has a rolling 18-month pipeline that extends beyond Finance and HR for the first time in the program's history.