North Labs automated Bluemark's entire manual data workflow in just two and a half weeks, eliminating hours of daily spreadsheet work and connecting their data systems into a seamless, real-time pipeline.
"In an extremely short period, we went from dealing with spreadsheets in the Data Stone Ages to living on the cutting edge of data management, and at a fraction of the expected cost."
"We are a young company. So it was great that the team at North Labs really took us under their wings. They are more than partners, they are mentors to us."
— Paul Riccio, Project Manager, Bluemark
Bluemark is a logistics company specializing in branded promotional products, handling the full process from sourcing and design through manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping. In 2022, they launched Brand Courier, a last-mile, white-glove delivery and installation service for retail locations.
Behind this straightforward service was a painfully manual data process. When delivery orders came in, data had to be cleaned before entering Bluemark's proprietary application. Once couriers completed a job, all related data had to be cleaned again and entered into a separate system that fed client-facing dashboards.
"I was the person touching that data every day, and let me tell you, that process was highly manual and extremely time-consuming," said Project Manager Paul Riccio. "I would spend as many as two hours daily cleaning data and making calculations and transformations using Excel and Google Sheets, column by column."
Paul and Account Manager Marc Brewer needed a system that would eliminate the tedious manual data processing and automatically generate KPI dashboards for their clients, without requiring constant human intervention.
The North Labs team started by obtaining a clear understanding of what data cleaning, calculations, and transformations were being done manually every day. They then explored, analyzed, and tested several tools on the market to find the best-functioning and most affordable option for automating Bluemark's workflows.
North Labs diagrammed Paul's entire daily data routine and designed an automated pipeline to replace it. The team built the workflow, created the data pipeline connecting Bluemark's two data systems, and wrote automation scripts to handle everything that had been done by hand.
The entire automation project was completed in just two and a half weeks. Now, when data comes in, the system cleans it and moves it properly between systems, automatically populating KPI dashboards for Bluemark's clients without any manual intervention.
Bluemark went from hours of manual data processing every day to a fully automated, real-time data pipeline, delivered in under three weeks.
The automated workflow now handles data cleaning, transformation, and system-to-system movement without human intervention. Client-facing dashboards update automatically with dynamic visualizations, and data accuracy improved dramatically with manual entry errors eliminated entirely.
"The automated workflow that the North Labs team created was amazing," said Marc Brewer. "They developed the workflow and figured out how to create a data pipeline to connect our two data systems. They drew up automation scripts to handle what we had been doing manually."
Let's talk about how North Labs can automate your data workflows and give your team time back.