The workaround became the process
A WhatsApp message confirms what the system already recorded. Everyone uses it, so nobody questions it, and now there are two records.
Services
Business process improvement
A purchase order is printed, signed, scanned and emailed back to the same building. Stock is counted twice because the first count is not trusted. Most of these steps were necessary once — a rule, a person or a system that no longer exists — and they survived because nobody asked whether they still earned their place. Before writing software, we walk the process and take the steps out.
Who it is for
- Operations teams where closing each month needs extra hours to finish the same work.
- Businesses about to buy software to fix a process nobody has described on paper.
- Managers who suspect the work is slower than it needs to be and cannot point at the step that causes it.
Problems it solves
Approvals catch a person, not a case
Every purchase past a small amount needs a signature. It catches nothing and adds two days, because the same three people sign everything.
Two systems and a person between them
Someone exports a file, edits it and imports it back. When they are on leave the process stops, and what they change is written nowhere.
Use cases
Purchasing, from request to receipt
Request, approval, purchase order, receipt, supplier invoice. At each step: who touches it, what they add, and whether the next step reads what they added.
Warehouse receiving without double entry
The delivery note and the system entry are compared once, at the door, and a mismatch stops there instead of surfacing in the stock count three weeks later.
Month-end close, step by step
Everything done in the last three days of the month, in order, with the person and the file for each. Half of them usually turn out to be checks of earlier steps.
A shift handover that carries the exceptions
Open issues, cash drawer differences and pending deliveries written once and read by the next shift, instead of a verbal handover that loses the third item.
What is in scope
Fixed scope. Fixed price.
Agreed in writing before anything is built. You approve before we start.
- A map of the process as it runs today, drawn with the people who run it
- The time and the handoffs per step, measured rather than estimated
- A list of steps that exist only because of a constraint that no longer applies
- A shorter process, agreed with the people who will use it
- The controls that must stay, written down with their reason
- Automation for the steps that survived the cut, and only those
How it is delivered
- 01
Stand where the work happens
Not in a meeting room. We watch a real order, a real delivery, a real close, and write the steps as they happen — including the ones people do not mention because they are obvious.
- 02
Draw it as it is
One page: boxes, arrows, and the names of the people and the files. If the page does not match what people remember doing, the page is wrong and we redraw it.
- 03
Ask what each step is for
A step stays if it catches an error, satisfies an auditor, or produces something the next step reads. Otherwise it is a candidate for removal, and we say what breaks if it goes.
- 04
Remove first, then automate
The software arrives after the process is shorter. Automating a step that should not exist makes the waste faster and harder to see.
FAQ
Questions about this service.
What owners usually ask before requesting a quote for it.
Do we have to change the software too?
Usually not. Many of the removed steps disappear with a decision, not a release. Where a step survives and repeats, we automate it in the system you already use or in a small tool.
Who decides which steps stay?
The person who owns the process, with the people who run it in the room. We bring the evidence: what the step costs and what it catches. We do not have the authority to remove a control, and we should not.
What if we have already automated the wrong process?
Then the map comes first and the automation waits. Sometimes what was built is still right and only the sequence is wrong; sometimes it automates a step that should go. We will say which, with the step in front of us.
Does this need a full-time project?
No. One process map is a short piece of work, and the first removals are decisions rather than development. The part that takes time is agreeing on the change, not drawing it.
Start a project
Want this scoped for your business?
Send the brief. It comes back as a written scope and a fixed quote before anything is built.