A 4-week clinical operations audit that maps how work actually flows through your business — where it stalls, where it duplicates, where humans do what scripts could. Output: a prioritised hit-list of fixes, automation candidates with ROI, and a 90-day execution plan.
Operational drag is the most expensive line item that's never on a balance sheet. SA mid-market businesses leak 18–32% of operating capacity to friction nobody is paid to fix.
Process inherited from the previous COO, baked in 2018, never re-examined. Three tool changes later, the workflow still bears the shape of a phantom requirement.
R12k/mo on a CRM the sales team partly uses. R8k/mo on a project tool engineering doesn't open. Every adoption gap creates a parallel manual process.
One person keeps it all running by working weekends. The process looks fine — until that person takes leave, and the org realises there was a one-person dependency.
"Let's automate this." But automating a broken process at scale only ships the broken-ness faster. Map first, fix second, automate third.
The classic Lean taxonomy — adapted for service businesses, not just manufacturing. Every process gets scored against each waste. The high-scoring wastes get the fixes.
Work that has to be redone because it wasn't right the first time. Mis-typed invoices, wrong-sent contracts, FICA forms missing fields.
Reports nobody reads. Features nobody uses. Meetings whose attendees couldn't summarise the outcome. Doing more than the customer values.
Work sits in someone's queue. Approvals wait days. Hand-offs sit overnight. The cycle time is mostly air, not labour.
Senior people doing junior work. Skilled people on manual data entry. Smart people in meetings that should be a Slack message.
Information copied between systems. CSV exports across teams. Same data re-keyed 3 times because the systems don't talk.
Backlog of work-in-progress nobody is moving. Drafts gathering dust. Tickets in "in review" for weeks. Pre-built collateral nobody uses.
Tab-switching. App-hopping. Searching for the right doc, the right form, the right person. Every context switch is friction.
Approvals required by no policy. Steps in the workflow that nobody can defend. "We always Cc the legal team" — for what reason, exactly?
People tell you how the process is meant to work. The system logs show what actually happens. We use both — plus 4 others — because one source alone always lies a little.
Open-ended interviews with operators, supervisors, and customers. We ask what's broken, what's heroic, what's invisible. Coded for themes.
We sit with the team for 2-3 sessions and watch the work happen. Real desks, real screens, real Slack pings. Reality usually disagrees with the SOP.
CRM activity, ticket timestamps, accounting transactions, support logs. The truth of how long things actually take — not how long people remember.
What tools do you pay for, who uses them, and what's the actual adoption rate? We list every subscription and the seats-vs-actives ratio.
What does the written SOP say vs what actually happens? Gap analysis between the documented process and the operational reality.
Selected operators track their time in 15-min blocks for 10 working days. Granular ground truth on where labour hours actually go.
Anonymised excerpt from a recent engagement (Cape Town financial services firm, R140m turnover). Same process — quote-to-cash — before and after the redesign. Three steps killed, two automated, one moved upstream.
The audit surfaces the friction. These six patterns are where automation pays for itself within 12 weeks. We score each candidate by effort, ROI and risk.
Reading invoices, contracts, FICA docs into structured fields. Replaces hours of typing. Typical payback in 3-6 weeks.
Eliminating manual data hand-offs between CRM, accounting, ops tools. Zapier / n8n / custom webhooks — whichever fits.
Rule-based routing of approvals. Auto-approve below thresholds, escalate above. Slack-native sign-offs replace email chains.
Replacing manually-built Monday reports with live dashboards. Self-serve, single source of truth, refresh-free.
"Where's my order?" "Can I reset my password?" "When's my invoice due?" Moving these out of the support inbox.
AI-classified inbound — emails, tickets, leads. Routes to the right team with a context summary attached.
Not a 100-page report. Five tight artefacts your team can act on this week. Process maps in your tool of choice, the hit-list in Linear, the ROI in Excel.
The headline narrative: what's broken, why, how it shows up, who feels it. Scored against the DOWNTIME wastes. 12–18 page PDF, board-ready.
The three highest-friction processes mapped as visual swim-lanes — actors, steps, time-in-step, hand-offs, system touches. Editable in FigJam or Miro.
20–40 specific opportunities, each with effort estimate, expected impact, ROI band, owner suggestion. Sorted by quick-wins → strategic bets.
Labour hours saved, cycle-time reduction, SaaS spend reclaimed, automation cost — modelled per opportunity. Sensitivity to assumptions built in.
The first 90 days of execution sequenced — quick wins in weeks 1-4, deeper fixes in weeks 5-9, strategic moves teed up for weeks 9-13. Owner-tagged.
We present the findings to your board / exco. Slides included. We answer the awkward questions in the room — so you don't have to defend the report cold.
You'll spend ~10 hours across the engagement — most in week 1 (interviews) + the final readout. The middle two weeks we're in your systems & sitting with your teams.
12–18 stakeholder interviews. Operators, supervisors, customers. Themes coded; SOPs collected.
Gemba walks, system-log mining, SaaS audit. Time-tracking diary starts with 4 volunteers.
Process maps drafted. DOWNTIME scoring applied. Hit-list assembled. ROI model populated.
90-day plan finalised. Exec readout delivered. Hand-over to your team or our build squad.
Aggregated from operations engagements 6+ months out. Your numbers will be yours — these are the order-of-magnitude bracket.
Fee fixed in writing. The audit is yours — implementation is your team's call. We don't take a percentage of savings; we charge a fixed fee and tell you the truth.
If yours isn't here, send us a current-state SOP or screen recording of your team working. We'll come back with a written critique in 48h.
Draw your most painful process on a napkin, take a photo, and email it to us. Or send the SOP, or a screen recording of the team doing it. Within 48 hours we'll come back with a written critique: the 3 biggest bottlenecks we see, the 1 thing to fix this week, and whether a full audit is the right next step.