Onsite Process Audit: Half a Day on Your Floor, Then a Costed Map
We drive out to you, spend roughly half a day watching the actual work, and hand back a written opportunity map with a cost and a payback estimate against every item on it. The report is the product. You are buying our information, not sitting through a sales pitch with a proposal at the end.
Nobody can tell you where their own time goes. That is not a criticism, it is just how work is: the double keying, the third phone call to chase the same job number, the spreadsheet that exists because a system field was never turned on. It shows up when someone sits quietly beside the person doing it. The fee is quoted on the scoping call before a date goes in the diary, capacity is about one of these a fortnight, and the fee comes off whatever you decide to build afterwards.
Realistic ROI
Four Reasons the Day Beats a Questionnaire
Remote discovery calls produce a tidy version of the business. Standing in it produces the real one.
What people describe is the official process, not the real one
Ask a business owner how a job goes from enquiry to invoice and you will get a clean seven step answer. Watch it happen and you will find eleven steps, two of which exist because a system upgrade three years ago broke a field nobody has mentioned since. The workarounds are invisible to the people performing them because they have become the job. Half a day of quiet observation is where two or three of those surface, and no questionnaire would ever have asked about them.
The report is the product, not a lead magnet
Most free audits in this market are a sales call wearing a lab coat. This one is a paid deliverable, and that changes what it can say. Because you have already paid for the information, we are free to write down that a problem needs a conversation with a supplier rather than a system, or that your existing software already does the thing you were about to buy a second product for. You are buying an outside opinion that is not fishing for a build.
Being a small Victorian outfit is exactly why this works
A Big Four firm will not send a partner to Traralgon for half a day, and a Sydney software vendor will offer you a Teams call and a demo environment. We are close enough that driving to Pakenham, Warragul, Dandenong or Geelong is an ordinary Tuesday rather than a project cost. That geography is a real constraint and we publish it honestly: we do not claim national coverage, because we cannot do this properly from a plane.
A fair share of what we find is not a software problem
We expect a meaningful share of any opportunity map to be process change rather than software: a form that should ask three more questions, a handover that should happen once instead of twice, an approval that nobody actually needs. Those items are usually the cheapest and fastest wins on the list, and they are worth writing down even though they earn us nothing. A consultant who only finds problems that their own product solves is not doing an audit, they are doing a demonstration.
What Actually Happens on the Day
No workshops, no butcher paper, no whole team pulled off the tools for a day. We come to the work.
Before we arrive
A short call to agree what we are looking at and who we should stand next to. We ask for read only access to whatever job, quote or invoice records you are willing to share, and for a rough count of the last three months of jobs, calls or orders so we arrive with a sense of the volume. If you have a system we have not seen before, that prep time is spent reading its documentation rather than yours. You do not need to prepare anything or tidy anything up. A tidied process is a useless process to look at.
First hour: the walk
We walk the whole path the work takes, in the order the work takes it. Where the phone rings, where the enquiry gets written down, where the quote is built, where the job is scheduled, where the parts come from, where the paperwork ends up. This hour is mostly about finding the places where information changes hands, because those handovers are where nearly all the loss and nearly all the rework lives. We take photos of whiteboards, job boards and printed sheets with your permission, because those are almost always a system that should exist and does not.
Middle: sit beside the people doing it
We sit with three or four people at their actual desks and benches and watch them work, asking as little as possible. The most useful question is not what do you do, it is show me the last one you did. Real records beat descriptions every time, because a real record has the messy bits still attached. We are specifically listening for the phrases that give the game away: I just check it again here, it usually comes through twice, I keep my own list because the system does not.
The numbers
Nothing on the map gets costed on a hunch. We count what we can count on the day: how many times a piece of information is entered, how many minutes a task actually took while we watched, how many of the last fifty jobs needed a rework touch. Where a number is a genuine estimate we label it as one, with the range. A costed opportunity map is only useful if you can defend its numbers to a sceptical bookkeeper, so we write down where each figure came from.
Last hour: playback
Before we leave we sit down for twenty or thirty minutes and tell you what we saw, unpolished. This matters because you get to correct us while we are still standing in the building. If we have misread why something is done a certain way, that is the moment to say so, and it is common. It also means the written report never lands as a shock, which is what usually kills a consultant document inside an organisation.
Five business days later: the report
A written document, as long as it needs to be for what we found and not padded out to look substantial. A flow map of how work moves today, a ranked list of opportunities with an estimated annual cost of the current state and a rough build cost against each, a separate section for the fixes that need no software at all, and an honest list of the things we looked at and decided to leave alone. Yours to keep, share with your accountant, or take to a different supplier entirely.
A Study Day Against the Alternatives
| Task | Traditional | Half a day on the floor | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understanding the real process | A discovery call and a questionnaire | Watching it happen for four hours | The workarounds people have stopped noticing are the ones that cost the most, and they never appear on a form. |
| Finding the double entry | Someone remembers to mention it | Counted at the desk where it happens | Typical finding is that one piece of information is keyed in two or three places, none of which agree by Friday. |
| Costing an opportunity | A vendor ROI calculator | Observed minutes and your own job counts | A calculator you fill in yourself returns whatever you put into it. An observed baseline can be argued with. |
| Deciding what to build first | Whatever annoys the loudest person | A ranked list with payback against each | The loudest annoyance is often the third best return. It should still get fixed, just not first. |
| Fixes that need no software | Not in scope for a software vendor | Their own section in the report | Usually the fastest wins available. We write them down knowing they earn us nothing. |
| Getting staff on board | Told about it after the decision | Asked about it while the work is in their hands | People who were consulted while doing their job rarely fight the change later. This is not a soft benefit. |
| What you own afterwards | A proposal for the vendor’s product | A document you can take anywhere | Including to a competitor of ours, or to nobody at all. That is the point of paying for it. |
| What the day costs you | A free audit that is really a sales call | A quoted fee, credited if you build | Paying for information buys you the right to hear that you do not need to buy anything. |
Where a Study Day Goes Wrong
Booking it on the quietest day of the week
The most common mistake is choosing a calm day so the visit is convenient. A quiet Wednesday shows us an idealised version of the operation where nothing collides and everyone has time to do it properly. Pick a normal or slightly busy day, ideally one where the phones run hot and the schedule has to be reshuffled. The failure modes are the whole point, and they only appear under load.
Announcing it as an efficiency review
If staff believe an outsider is measuring them for a headcount decision, you will be shown the performance version of the job and nothing useful will surface. Tell people plainly what it is: someone is coming in to find where the admin is wasting their time and what could be taken off their plate. It has the advantage of being true. If a headcount decision genuinely is on the table, say so before we arrive so we can decline the engagement or scope it honestly.
Expecting a build quote at the end of the day
The deliverable is a costed opportunity map with rough build ranges, not a fixed price proposal. A fixed price needs data model work, access to the systems and a written specification, none of which fit in half a day. Anyone who hands you a firm quote on the afternoon of the visit has either done that work in advance or is guessing, and the second is far more common than the first.
The owner following us around all day
Understandable and completely counterproductive. Staff behave differently when the boss is present, and the most valuable observations come from the twenty minutes when nobody senior is standing there. We want you for the first half hour and the playback at the end. In between, the best thing you can do is go and do your own work and let us be a mild nuisance to everyone else.
Treating the report as a decision
The map ranks opportunities and costs them. It does not decide your capital priorities, your appetite for change or what your team can absorb this quarter. We have watched businesses take a well ranked list and attempt four items at once, which reliably delivers none of them. The report is an input to a decision that remains yours, and the sequencing conversation is usually worth another hour a fortnight later.
Assuming we will travel anywhere
We publish the radius because it is a real limit, not a marketing position. Melbourne, the south east growth corridor, Gippsland out to about Sale, and Geelong with the Bellarine and Surf Coast. Beyond that the travel stops being half a day and starts being a project cost that distorts the value of the exercise. If you are in Bendigo, Albury or interstate, ask anyway and we will give you a straight answer rather than quietly pricing in a flight.
How Yes AI Runs the Study Day
Observation first, opinions second
We arrive without a product to place. The first half of the day is spent looking and counting, and we deliberately do not form recommendations until the numbers are on paper. That order matters, because a consultant who decides in the first hour will spend the remaining three collecting evidence for the decision they already made.
The report is yours outright
No watermarks, no proposal appendix, no clause that ties it to us. Take it to your accountant, your board, your existing IT provider or another consultancy. If someone else builds it better or cheaper, that is a good outcome for you and we would rather you had an honest map than a captive one.
We will tell you when the answer is nothing
Some businesses we visit are already running tight, and the honest finding is that the two irritations they are worried about are worth less than the disruption of fixing them. That report is shorter and it is still the right answer, and being paid for the day is exactly what makes it possible to write.
The fee comes off the build
If the map leads to work with us, the study day fee is credited against the first invoice, so you are not paying twice to have the same problem understood. If it leads nowhere, or leads somewhere we cannot help with, there is no further obligation and no follow up sequence.
From First Call to Costed Map
Five steps over about three weeks, most of which is calendar rather than work.
A short scoping call
Fifteen to twenty minutes to confirm what we would be looking at, how many sites and roles are involved, whether you sit inside the travel radius, and what the day would cost. If a study day is the wrong instrument for your question, this is where we say so.
Prep and a date in the diary
We agree a normal working day rather than a quiet one, confirm who we will stand beside, and read whatever systems documentation and volume figures you are comfortable sharing beforehand so the day is not spent on basics.
The day on your floor
The walk, the observation, the counting and the playback, in that order. Four to five hours on site. Your team keeps working. Nobody gets pulled into a workshop.
The written map, five business days later
Flow map of current state, ranked opportunities with costed current state and rough build ranges, a separate section for the process fixes that need no software, and an explicit list of what we looked at and chose to leave alone.
A walkthrough call, then your decision
Half an hour to talk through the report and argue with it. After that the ball is entirely in your court. If you want a fixed price on one item, that becomes a separate scoped piece of work with the study day fee credited.
Related Reading
AI Walkthrough Day: Melbourne
The same offer framed for Melbourne and the south east corridor, with the honest travel radius.
Process Mapping Day for SMEs
The non software version: map how the work flows before deciding if software is the answer at all.
AI Readiness Checklist
What to have in order before anybody automates anything.
Writing an AI Project Brief
How to turn an opportunity map into something a supplier can quote.
AI Consultant, Gippsland
Warragul, Drouin, Moe, Morwell, Traralgon and Sale.
Replacing Spreadsheets
What to do about the shadow system every study day finds.
FAQ
Find Out Where the Day Actually Goes
Book a short scoping call. We will tell you whether a study day is the right instrument, what it would cost, and whether you sit inside the radius we can honestly service. If it is the wrong thing to buy, we will say so on the call.
All discussions held in confidence. Australian-based consultants.