The audit: we learn how the work actually moves
4 weeks on site with the operations team. Process owners get shadowed rather than surveyed, because the shadow spreadsheet and the approval that happens in a hallway never come up on a call.
A process and time map, a controls register, the exception taxonomy in your team's own wording, a volume baseline pulled from the systems rather than estimated, and a build plan signed by the people who run the work. $15–25k, credited in full against a build signed within 90 days.
19 sessions with 15 people. Every session transcribed and tagged against the workflow it describes.
| Role | Sessions | Minutes each | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service coordinators | 5 | 90 | Queue work, which exceptions repeat, and the spreadsheets nobody documented |
| Warehouse leads | 4 | 60 | Pick, pack and the gap between the system and the floor |
| Procurement | 3 | 60 | Vendor onboarding packet, expiry tracking, supplier performance |
| Customer service manager | 4 | 60 | Routing rules, escalation paths, ticket taxonomy |
| COO and site managers | 3 | 45 | Service levels, expedite policy, what gets escalated |
46 sources ingested, indexed and made queryable. The working spreadsheets matter most, because they are where the real process lives when the SOP has drifted.
11 systems mapped, including the ones nobody lists on an architecture diagram.
- SAP ECC · ERP
- Manhattan WMS · Warehouse
- Zendesk · Service desk
- Ariba · Procurement
- Outlook · Shared inboxes
- Carrier portals · Logistics
- DocuSign · Contracting
- Snowflake · Reporting
- Excel · Working files
- SharePoint · Documents
- Teams · Coordination
In-scope process work, not total department labour
| Driver | Volume | Hours/yr |
|---|---|---|
| Customer service tickets | 34,000 at 11 min | 6,233 |
| Order exceptions | 8,900 at 24 min | 3,560 |
| Vendor onboarding | 210 vendors at 5.5 hrs | 1,155 |
| Returns disposition | 4,200 at 18 min | 1,260 |
| Intake routing and triage | 12,000 requests at 7 min | 1,400 |
| Cross-system reconciliation | 12 cycles at 91 hrs, WMS against ERP | 1,092 |
| Total in scope | 14,700 |
- Carried by agents9,702 hrs66%
- Stays with people4,998 hrs34%
4,998 hours a year remain manual, and should: judgement calls, genuine exceptions, and the relationships that need a person on the other end. The two shares are complements of one another, so they sum to 100 by construction.
Order exception detection
Catching a short ship before it leaves the dock is worth more than explaining it afterwards.
Helpdesk triage
Highest ticket volume of the five workflows and the most repetitive.
Vendor onboarding
Insurance certificates, tax forms and banking details, checked against what the packet requires.
Intake routing
Requests arrive in three shared inboxes and get read twice before anyone owns them.
Returns disposition
Lowest automatable share of the five because condition assessment stays with a person.
The five sum to $734k, the same modelled annual value shown in chapter 01. Bars are each workflow's value against the largest of the five.
- Audit · 4 weeks
- P1 Order exception detection
- P2 Helpdesk triage
- P3 Vendor onboarding
- P4 Intake routing
- P5 Returns disposition
- Operate · ongoing
Audit 4 weeks, build 12–14 weeks, then continuous operation. Workflows overlap because the connector work for one is usually most of the connector work for the next.
Session counts, document counts and hours are modelled against the basis company, not recorded from an engagement. The method is real; the volumes are what a 95-person operations function at that size would produce.