Every recurring process in your business, costed, ranked and sequenced

One costed process is not a plan

The free assessment puts a yearly cost on one process. It is a good start and a poor basis for a year of spending. The process you named is the one that annoys you most, which is not the same as the one that costs you most, and it is rarely the one that should be fixed first. The roadmap exists to cost the whole operation so that the order of work is decided by payback rather than by who complained loudest.

Who we talk to, and why it is not the leadership team first

We open with an hour with you and your COO or CFO to agree which functions are in scope. After that we spend most of the two to three weeks with the people who actually do the work: the bookkeeper who keys supplier bills, the coordinator who re-enters orders from email into the operations system, the person who reads every inbound form to decide who gets a call.

We do it this way because owners consistently misjudge their own processes. They know the steps but not the volume, or the volume but not the rework, or neither of those but the delay it causes the next team along. The people doing the work know all three. We interview them at their desks where we can, because the screen tells us things the interview does not.

Two numbers per process

Each recurring process gets a yearly cost using the same working as the free assessment: volume, minutes per item, loaded hourly cost, downstream delay. Then it gets two more numbers. The cost to fix, which is what building and running the automation would come to, including the review load it leaves behind for a person. And the cost to leave alone, which is the yearly cost carried forward over the period you would otherwise be spending the fix money.

Payback falls out of those two. Ranking by payback is what makes the roadmap defensible in front of a board: every position on the list has a reason you can read.

Draft numbers go back to each function before they are final.

The sequence

The ranked list becomes a twelve-month sequence. Not everything near the top goes first, because some fixes depend on others: you cannot automate the chase for overdue invoices until the invoices themselves are raised consistently. The sequence states those dependencies plainly. It also says which items we would not fix yet, with the reason for each: too irregular, too cheap to leave alone, or already possible with a settings change in software you own.

The board version fits on one page: the ranking, the sequence, and the total cost of leaving everything as it is.

What goes wrong with roadmaps, and what we do about it

Roadmaps fail in the drawer. They are written for the board meeting, praised, and never opened again, because they were written at a level of abstraction nobody can act on. Ours names processes, systems and people, so the person who picks it up in month four knows exactly what to build and who to ask.

They also fail by flattering the buyer. A plan in which every item is worth doing is telling you what you hoped, not what is true. Expect to see items crossed off.

Where it leaves you

You hold a document your own team could execute without us. Many businesses take the first item to Workflow Automation, and the roadmap fee is credited against that engagement. Some run the plan in-house. Either way, the ranking is yours and the plan does not expire when we leave. What remains with your leadership team is the decision about pace: how much of the sequence to fund this year, and what to defer.