Nordkessel AG, Use Case Identification Workshop
Executive summary
Across a two-day workshop with Nordkessel AG's operations and finance teams, we mapped nine candidate automation use cases. Four are recommended for a 12-week first wave.
At a glance
Purchase order approval passes through four inboxes before it reaches the ERP
Every purchase order today is touched by procurement, the requesting department, finance, and procurement again. Each handover is a manual email forward, and the audit trail lives across four separate mailboxes rather than one system of record.
HR onboarding checklists are tracked in a shared spreadsheet
New joiners are added to a shared Excel tracker that HR updates manually against eleven separate systems (payroll, badge access, laptop provisioning, and others). Missed rows are the most common source of onboarding delay.
Nordkessel automation maturity, current vs. 6-month target
Scores from nine stakeholder interviews using the Lunnoa maturity framework (1 = ad hoc, 5 = optimised).
“We know exactly what the process should look like on paper. The problem is that on paper and in four inboxes are not the same thing.
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Commit to a 12-week first wave covering purchase order approval, onboarding, and expense triage
The three use cases share a deployment pattern (Lunnoa agent plus ERP API plus ticket fan-out) and together cover the largest concentration of manual hours observed during the workshop.
Use cases identified
Nine candidate use cases came out of the workshop, scored on implementation effort and business impact. Four sit in the quick-win zone and are recommended for wave one.
Nine use cases scored on effort and impact
Effort and impact both scored 1 to 5 by the workshop group
Recommended for wave one
Purchase order approval
- Impact
- ≈ 240 hrs / month
- Effort
- M
- TTV
- 6 weeks
Employee onboarding checklist
- Impact
- ≈ 140 hrs / month
- Effort
- S
- TTV
- 4 weeks
Expense report triage
- Impact
- ≈ 90 hrs / month
- Effort
- S
- TTV
- 3 weeks
Supplier contract renewal alerts
- Impact
- ≈ 60 hrs / month
- Effort
- S
- TTV
- 4 weeks
Manual hours per month, before vs. projected after wave one
- Purchase order arrives by email, forwarded across four inboxes for sign-off.
- Finance re-keys header and line data into the ERP once approval finally lands.
- No single record shows where an order currently sits.
- Lunnoa agent receives the request, applies the approval matrix, and routes automatically.
- Approved orders post to the ERP directly; exceptions land in one queue.
- Procurement sees live status for every order in one view.
Roadmap and next steps
Wave one is scoped as a 12-week delivery, deployed on Nordkessel's own infrastructure with no data leaving the client environment.
Wave one, 12-week delivery
Foundation work runs in parallel with the first use case build
Phase 1, Foundation
Weeks 1 to 3- ERP middleware exposed
- Lunnoa platform deployed on client infrastructure
- SSO configured
Phase 2, Build expense triage and onboarding
Weeks 4 to 7- Expense triage live week 6
- Onboarding checklist agent live week 7
Phase 3, Build purchase order approval
Weeks 8 to 11- Approval matrix configured
- ERP write-back tested with finance
Phase 4, Stabilise and handover
Week 12- Runbook handed to internal IT
- Wave two backlog agreed
Agree the wave two backlog before wave one delivery completes
Supplier contract renewal alerts and customer ticket routing are the strongest wave two candidates based on the effort and impact scoring. Confirming scope in week ten avoids a gap between waves.
Workshop participants