Effort and ideas are rarely the missing piece. What's missing is someone whose only job is to look at the process from outside and say what should change.
Time with the people who actually do the work — for as long as it takes to see the whole thing happen.
Not a workshop, not a questionnaire, not a meeting with the management team. We sit beside the quality manager while they write up a report. We follow a purchase order from the moment somebody wants something to the moment it's paid. We watch the workarounds — the second spreadsheet, the WhatsApp group, the folder on someone's desktop — that nobody mentions because they stopped noticing them years ago.
Anyone doing a job every day stops seeing the odd parts of it — the second system kept alongside the first, the manual step before the automated one, the report nobody reads any more. They become furniture. Watching is how they get noticed again.
An honest account of where the time actually goes, including the parts that aren't flattering — and a decision you can make on information rather than instinct.
The process written down as it really runs.
Step by step and handover by handover, with the time each part takes, who touches it, and every place information gets re-entered, chased or lost. Not the process in the manual. Not the one designed five years ago. The one that happened this week.
Each department knows its own stretch and assumes the rest works. The map puts all of it on one page, and the handovers between them are usually where the time goes.
The map itself, in a format you own and can hand to anyone — a new starter, an auditor, a buyer. Plus a shortlist of what to fix, ordered by what it's costing you rather than by how easy it would be. It's worth having even if you never automate anything: more than one client has made changes off the back of the map alone.
A real map, from a subcontractor's enquiry-to-invoice process. Sixteen steps, drawn twice — how it runs today, and how we would design it.
Automating a broken process only means being wrong more quickly.
A number produced before the watching is a guess.
Nothing about the job changes — the same steps, in the same order. What changes is what sits between them. Today a person carries the information from one step to the next, re-keying it, chasing it, holding the state of it in their head. Designed properly, that information moves on its own and you appear where your judgement is actually needed.
We connect what you already pay for and add only what's genuinely missing. Most of what we build sits between things, moving information from where it's captured to where it's needed — so the people in the middle stop being the integration.
Documented, tested, and explained to the people who'll use it. Your data is yours and anything living in your own systems stays there. Custom software that runs on our systems is licensed to you and we keep the source — escrow if you need it — and we'll always tell you plainly where a dependency exists rather than gloss over it.
The first conversation is free. After it, there are three ways to work with us, and we'll tell you which one fits.
If you can show us enough to price it, you get a written proposal free, with one fixed price for the work. Any time we spend in your office is inside that price, not added to it.
If things are slow and you can't say why, we spend time in your office watching the work happen, at a day rate agreed before we start. You come out knowing where the first bottleneck is and what to fix first. You don't have to have us build anything.
You get an agreed number of days a week, invoiced every two weeks along with a report of what's been built and the plan for the next two. Once a month we sit down together, on Teams or in your office, to check it's on track and reorder the list so the most important things always come first.
Then the cost of running it. If what we build runs on our systems, there's a fixed monthly cost to use it, and you'll know that figure before you agree to anything. If it's built into your own systems, it's yours to run and there's nothing further to pay us.
No surprises. Whichever route, the price or the days are agreed before we start, and you're invoiced for what was agreed.
Book a discovery callOr describe one job and we'll draw it back to you →