An industrial manufacturer from eastern Croatia with 90 employees — producing specialized components for the European market. Growth over the past 5 years from 30 to 90 people happened organically, through new contracts and added shifts. Processes grew reactively, without systematic planning.

The owner noticed concrete signals: he no longer knew who was actually contributing how much, some staff worked twice as much as others, and no bonus system existed — which meant annual bonuses were becoming a "political" decision, which led to dissatisfaction among the best people.

On top of that: all production paperwork (work orders, quality control, maintenance logs) was still going through Excel and paper documents. Shift leads were spending 2–3 hours a day on filling in reports by hand.

We started with Business Process Improvement — the diagnostic phase identified where the real time losses were and where no measurable performance criteria existed.

We structured the solution in three layers.

Measurement layer — we defined concrete performance criteria by role. Shift leads have measurable targets around output and quality. Maintenance technicians have targets around proactive interventions. Admin has clear SLAs for order processing. Every criterion is tracked weekly, not monthly — a shorter measurement interval means faster correction.

Bonus and progression — we tied the measurement criteria to concrete financial consequences. Bonuses are now transparent — everyone knows what's measured and how it translates into a reward. The progression plan clearly shows which skills and results need to be demonstrated for promotion.

Paper digitization — work orders, quality control, and maintenance logs were moved from Excel into a system that connects all data. Shift leads no longer write reports by hand — the system generates them automatically from data that's entered during the work anyway. For routine document classification we also wired in AI & Automation.