Bottleneck Audit
Find out where the hours actually go.
Before anything is built, somebody has to know what the business actually does all day. We come in, follow the work, and come back with a report that names the bottlenecks, what each one costs you in hours, and which of them a machine should take over. It commits you to nothing else.
What You Get
The parts that decide whether it works.
Time With Your People
We talk to the people doing the work rather than the people describing it. The person who does a job daily knows where it jams.
The Work, End To End
One job followed from the first enquiry to the paid invoice, across every system and inbox it passes through. Bottlenecks usually sit between departments, not inside them.
Where The Hours Go
Each repeated step measured in hours a month, using your own numbers rather than an industry average. You cannot rank what nobody has counted.
What To Leave Alone
A named list of the processes we think should stay manual, and why. Low volume, changing rules and work where the judgement is the job all qualify.
Ranked By What It Saves
The candidates ordered by hours returned against effort to build, so the first thing you do is the one that pays back soonest.
A Written Report
Everything above in one document you own, written for whoever signs the cheque rather than for a developer. Take it to another firm if you would rather.
The same jobs come up in almost every business.
We look at how work moves through your business and report in writing where the hours go and which of them a machine should be doing.
We have not audited your business yet, so this is not a prediction. But the same jobs come up wherever paperwork moves between people: things a person retypes from one screen into another, things that wait in an inbox for somebody to notice, and things nobody has written down. The audit tells you which of these you actually have.
What we look for
- Data retyped from one system into another
- Quotes and invoices assembled by hand
- Enquiries waiting in an inbox overnight
- Reports rebuilt from scratch every month
- Approvals that stall because nobody was told
- Knowledge held by one person only
- Rules that live in somebody's head
What lands in your hands
Most businesses know something is slow without knowing which part. We sit with the people doing the work, follow a job from the first email to the last invoice, and count what each step costs in hours. The report names the steps worth automating, in order, and the ones that are not — a process that runs twice a month rarely pays back the build.
What's included
- A written report you keep
- Process map of one end-to-end workflow
- Hours-per-month figure for each repeated step
- Ranked shortlist of automation candidates
- Named list of what to leave manual
- The systems and data each step touches
- Estimated build effort for each candidate
- Walkthrough call to go through the findings
How An Engagement Runs
Audit first, then build what earns its keep.
Four stages, in order. Nothing is built before the audit says it is worth building, and nothing goes live before you have watched it run beside the manual process.
01. Audit
We sit with the people doing the work and record where the hours actually go, task by task. You get the findings in writing whether or not we build anything.
02. Pilot
One task, built and run beside the manual process rather than instead of it, so you can compare the output before anything is trusted with real work.
03. Deploy
The agent goes into your existing systems, with the handover, the access and the written record of what it does and where a person has to approve it.
04. Operate
We watch what it gets right and what it gets wrong, fix the second, and tell you when a task has changed enough that the agent should be retired.
Questions
Before you commit.
What do I get at the end of it?
A written report: a map of the workflow we followed, the hours each repeated step costs you in a month, a ranked shortlist of what is worth automating, and a named list of what is not. It is a document you own. If you take it to another firm and have them build it, that is a normal outcome and we will not argue about it.
Will you tell me not to automate something?
Regularly. A process that runs twice a month does not return the cost of building for it. Neither does one where the rules change every quarter, or one where the judgement is the actual job and the typing is the easy part. Naming those is half the value of an audit — the expensive mistake is not the automation nobody built, it is the one nobody needed.
Do I have to build anything with you afterwards?
No. The audit is a separate piece of work and it ends with the report. Some clients build the first agent with us, some hand the report to their own IT people, and some read it and decide the honest answer is to fix the process before putting software on top of it. All three are fine, and none of them changes what the audit costs.
How long does an audit take, and what do you need from me?
Both are scoped on the first call, because the honest answer depends on how many systems a job touches and how quickly we can get time with the people who do it. What we need does not change either way: conversations with the people doing the work, read-only access to the systems a job passes through, and real examples — actual quotes, actual invoices, actual email threads — rather than the version in the manual. Most of the elapsed time is us waiting on diaries, not us writing.
What happens to what you see in our business?
It stays between us. The report is written for you, and we do not publish it, name you as a client without asking, or reuse your process anywhere else. Access we are given is read-only wherever the system allows it, and is handed back at the end of the engagement. If you would rather have a signed non-disclosure agreement in place before the first call, send yours and we will sign it.
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