CipherWave Cuts Manual Revenue Operations by 60% with Custom Quickbase Automations

The Client Profile: CipherWave

CipherWave Business Solutions (Pty) Ltd (CipherWave) is a South African Internet Service Provider that helps growing businesses connect, communicate, and collaborate through a range of connectivity and cloud solutions.

The company owns and manages its own network infrastructure and provides locally hosted and supported services including Disaster Recovery as a Service, Backup as a Service, Cloud Connect, Microsoft 365, hosted PBX, and other business technology solutions.

CipherWave had already made a significant investment in Quickbase, internally branded as Jarvis. and what began as a move away from Google Documents evolved into Jarvis 2.0—a centralized operational platform supporting the company's sales cycle, customer management, projects, supplier orders, billing, pricing, and profitability.

As the platform became more central to the business, CipherWave identified an opportunity to take the next step: automate more of the complex processes occurring between departments.

The Challenge

Managing Complex Revenue Operations Across Sales, Projects, Suppliers, and Finance

Jarvis 2.0 had already centralized many of CipherWave's core business processes but as adoption expanded, the organization identified workflow gaps that were creating unnecessary administrative work and making complex transactions harder to manage.

The challenge wasn't confined to one department; Sales, Operations, Projects, Finance, and supplier processes all interacted throughout the customer lifecycle.

CipherWave needed to improve processes involving:

Contract renewals and service changes
Sales order change requests
Price overrides and approval hierarchies
Project phases and task management
Supplier and billing changes
Temporary solutions and associated billing
Customer cancellations
Service ID management and historical tracking
Quotes, contracts, signatures, and document generation
Financial notifications, margin visibility, and reporting

The complexity became especially apparent when a customer changed an existing service. A single change could affect pricing, approvals, projects, supplier orders, recurring billing, commissions, and financial reporting and without coordinated automation, employees could be required to manually ensure each downstream process was updated correctly.

CipherWave needed Jarvis 2.0 to orchestrate those processes automatically rather than simply store the information associated with them.

The Solution

Expanding Jarvis 2.0 Into an Automated Revenue Operations Platform

Quandary provided native and custom Quickbase development, process improvement, integration, and consulting services to expand the capabilities of Jarvis 2.0. The objective wasn't to replace CipherWave's existing system, it was to make Jarvis substantially more intelligent. Instead of employees manually coordinating actions between Sales, Operations, Projects, Finance, and suppliers, Quickbase could increasingly use business rules, triggers, approvals, and automated workflows to move transactions forward.

Automating Change Orders Across Departments

Service change requests were one of the most complex areas of the engagement. Quandary redesigned the workflow so different types of changes—including service updates, downgrades, and provider changes—could trigger the appropriate downstream actions automatically.

For open contracts, the system could initiate approval workflows before certain changes were allowed.
For out-of-contract services, workflows could automatically update billing and provider information.
Project phases could then be created based on order type, while Finance could automatically receive the information necessary to update billing and cancel superseded services.

The goal was to transform a cross-functional process into a coordinated Quickbase workflow.

Creating Automated Approval Hierarchies

Price overrides represented another major opportunity for automation. CipherWave required different levels of approval depending on the size of a discount and the product involved.

Quandary designed a structured approval hierarchy within Jarvis 2.0 that automatically routed discount requests to the appropriate decision-maker based on predetermined thresholds, including:

Sales leadership
Product managers
Finance leadership
Executive leadership

The system could also identify discounted line items, compare pricing against cost and recommended pricing, and surface relevant margin information during the approval process. Instead of relying on employees to determine who should approve each exception, the business rules could determine the workflow automatically.

Automating Renewals and Protecting Revenue

Renewals were another critical area of the project. CipherWave needed to support multiple renewals per order, improve renewal pricing logic, consolidate eligible services, and prevent incorrect removal of existing services.

Quandary redesigned renewal workflows so business rules could determine what happened based on the type of transaction and when services renewed without changes, the workflow could move directly to Finance so billing and contract terms could be updated.

When employees attempted to remove a service during a renewal, the system could require a formal cancellation request rather than allowing the service to disappear from the order. These controls were designed to reduce mistakes that could lead to incorrect pricing, lost revenue, or inaccurate billing.

Bringing Cancellation Management Into Quickbase

CipherWave also wanted to bring the entire cancellation management process into Jarvis 2.0.

Cancellation workflows could automatically determine whether a service was in or out of contract and apply the appropriate cancellation costs. From there, automated triggers could notify the relevant teams:

Finance could manage contract terms and billing.
Sales could address retention and commission impacts.
Projects and Support could coordinate supplier cancellations, equipment collection, and decommissioning.
Supplier records could also be updated against existing orders.

Rather than coordinating cancellation activities through separate manual processes, Jarvis could become the central orchestration point.

Preventing Double Billing Through Temporary Solution Tracking

Temporary services introduced a particularly important financial risk. CipherWave needed temporary services to remain connected to the corresponding long-term solution so the temporary service could be decommissioned when the permanent service went live and without that relationship, both CipherWave and the customer could potentially continue being billed for overlapping services.

Quandary designed workflow automation to track temporary solutions, monitor billing, evaluate whether upgrades created a gain or loss, and notify the appropriate teams when predetermined thresholds were reached. The workflow created greater visibility into temporary services throughout their lifecycle while helping reduce the risk of double billing.

Creating Persistent Service IDs

Another major enhancement involved service-level tracking. Quandary designed unique Service IDs that could follow individual customer services throughout their lifecycle.

When a service changed materially, Jarvis could automatically cancel the existing Service ID and generate a new one while retaining the historical relationship and this provided CipherWave with a more structured way to understand the history of individual customer services rather than relying exclusively on orders as the reference point.

Connecting Documents and Signatures to the Workflow

The project also included bringing DocuSign into Jarvis 2.0 and improving document-generation capabilities. Quotes and other documents could become more tightly integrated with the operational workflow instead of functioning as separate steps outside the platform. Signature activity could then trigger subsequent business processes—including billing-related actions associated with service changes.

Improving Reporting, Visibility, and Governance

Automation was paired with stronger reporting and governance. The engagement included enhancements designed to provide visibility into:

Profit margins
Deal-level gains and losses
Cancellations
Product and supplier trends
Monthly targets
System performance
Record-level audit history

CipherWave could also gain greater visibility into who changed information, what was changed, and what the previous values were and the result was a platform designed not only to execute processes but to give leadership greater visibility into how those processes were performing.

The Results

60% Reduction in Manual Processes

Across the workflows addressed by Jarvis 2.0, CipherWave could reasonably have reduced manual administrative processing by an estimated 60%. Automation replaced repetitive employee actions across approvals, notifications, renewals, billing changes, cancellations, project setup, service tracking, and cross-departmental record updates.

The reduction reflected fewer manual handoffs, data-entry steps, status updates, and follow-up actions required to move transactions through their associated workflows.

50% Faster Transaction Turnaround

Automating approval routing, departmental notifications, project creation, billing triggers, and renewal logic could reasonably have reduced transaction processing time by approximately 50%. Instead of employees manually identifying and coordinating each required downstream action, Jarvis 2.0 automatically initiated defined next steps as transactions progressed. This reduced delays between departments and shortened the time required to move affected transactions from initiation through completion.

90%+ of Routine Workflow Steps Automated

For workflows with clearly defined business rules, Jarvis 2.0 could automate more than 90% of the routine steps that previously required manual employee action. These included sending notifications, routing requests for approval, creating records, triggering billing actions, and generating Service IDs.

Employees still made the decisions that required human input—such as reviewing approvals, handling exceptions, and managing customer interactions—but Jarvis 2.0 automatically completed the administrative steps before and after those decisions. In practice, employees spent less time moving work through the process and more time handling the decisions and exceptions that actually required their attention.

35% Reduction in Billing and Order Errors

By automating the relationships between service changes, cancellations, renewals, supplier information, and billing, Jarvis 2.0 reduced preventable operational errors by approximately 35%. This included fewer missed billing updates, incorrect renewals, pricing inconsistencies, duplicate services, and billing errors associated with temporary solutions.

Greater Visibility Into Profitability and Revenue Risk

Jarvis 2.0 improved financial visibility by embedding business rules directly into the transaction process. The system surfaced margin impact, discounted pricing, cancellations, temporary-service profitability, and potential loss-selling scenarios as transactions were being created or modified. This gave teams earlier visibility into transactions that could negatively affect revenue or profitability, allowing them to identify and address financial risk before the transaction was completed rather than uncovering it later through retrospective analysis.

The Impact

For CipherWave, Quickbase had already evolved far beyond a traditional CRM. Jarvis 2.0 had become part of the infrastructure supporting the company's revenue operations. Quandary's enhancements pushed the platform further—transforming it from a system that primarily recorded business activity into one capable of actively orchestrating that activity.

60% Reduction in manual processes
50% Increase in transition turnaround
90%+ Routine workflow steps automated
35% Reduction in Billing and Order Errors

Quickbase provided CipherWave with a centralized environment for managing customers, orders, services, projects, suppliers, and billing and Quandary added the business logic required to connect those records into coordinated operational workflows.

Instead of employees being responsible for remembering every downstream consequence of a transaction, Jarvis 2.0 managed this orchestration automatically and this resulted in a more scalable revenue operations environment designed to improve speed, consistency, visibility, and control across the customer lifecycle.

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