Melbourne, the south east corridor, Gippsland and Geelong

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.

Book a Study Day Scoping Call (03) 9003 0111

Realistic ROI

Quoted before we book it

No open ended day rate

You get the number on the scoping call, before a date goes in the diary. Nothing is billed by the hour afterwards and there is no travel surcharge buried in it.

4 to 5 hours

Actually spent on your floor, not in a boardroom

Plus travel each way. We want the counter, the workshop, the despatch bench and the admin desk, not a meeting room with a projector.

About one a fortnight

Is the capacity we hold for these

A day out plus the write up is three days of work. We do not run a bench of junior analysts, so the calendar is genuinely limited.

100% credited

Against whatever you decide to build

If the map leads to a build with us, the study day fee comes off the first invoice. If it does not, you still keep the report and owe nothing further.

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.

Half a day of prep

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.

The physical map

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.

Observed reality

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.

A defensible baseline

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.

No surprises later

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.

The costed opportunity map

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

A 30-minute consultation 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.

FAQ

What exactly do I get for the fee?

Half a day of an experienced pair of eyes on your floor and a written, costed opportunity map delivered within five business days. The map contains a flow diagram of how work actually moves through the business today, a ranked list of opportunities with an estimated annual cost of the current state against each and a rough range for what fixing it would take, a separate section covering the fixes that need a process change rather than software, and an honest list of the things we examined and decided were not worth touching. It is yours outright, with no strings and no watermark, and you can hand it to any supplier you like.

How is this different from a free AI audit?

A free audit is a sales instrument, and everybody involved knows it. Because it costs the consultant time, it has to produce a proposal, which means the findings drift towards whatever that consultant sells. Paying for the information removes that pressure entirely. On a paid study day we can write down that your biggest problem is a supplier who sends unpriced order confirmations, or that the second system you were about to buy duplicates a module you already licence, because we are not depending on the report to generate a build. An initial 30-minute consultation is available to discuss fit. The 30-minute consultation is free for businesses with 20 or more full-time staff; otherwise AUD $200 including GST.

Where will you actually travel?

Melbourne, the south east growth corridor including Dandenong, Berwick, Narre Warren, Cranbourne, Clyde, Officer and Pakenham, West and Central Gippsland out to roughly Sale, and Geelong with the Bellarine and the Surf Coast. That is the published radius and we would rather state it plainly than pretend to national coverage. The point of the offer is that we can drive to you, be useful for half a day, and drive home, which is exactly what a Sydney software vendor or a Big Four firm will not do for a business your size. If you are outside that band, ask, and you will get a straight yes or no rather than a quiet travel surcharge.

Is the fee really credited if we build something?

Yes, in full, against the first invoice of whatever the subsequent engagement is. The logic is simple: if we end up building, we have already been paid to understand the problem, and charging twice for the same understanding would be indefensible. The credit applies to work delivered by us, and it does not expire in a fortnight, though after six months the operation has usually changed enough that some of the observation needs refreshing. If you never build anything, you owe nothing further and there is no drip campaign waiting for you.

How many of these do you run?

We hold capacity for about one a fortnight. A study day is a full day out including travel plus two more days writing the report properly, which is three days of a small consultancy’s week. We do not have a bench of junior analysts to send instead, and we would not send one if we did, because the value of the exercise sits entirely in the experience of the person doing the watching. The practical consequence is that the calendar is genuinely limited, so expect the next available date to sit a few weeks ahead rather than next Tuesday.

Should we do a full day instead of a half day?

Sometimes, and we will tell you which on the scoping call. A half day is right for a single site with one main flow of work, which describes most businesses under about forty staff. A full day starts to make sense when there are two genuinely different operations under one roof, when a second site materially changes the process, or when the work has a strong daily rhythm that only reveals itself if you stay for the afternoon peak as well as the morning one. We would rather scope it correctly than sell you the bigger version by default.

When is a study day the wrong thing to buy?

Three cases come up regularly. First, if you already know precisely what you want built and have written it down, you do not need an observation day, you need a scoping engagement and a quote. Second, if the business is in genuine financial distress, the honest advice is to spend the money on the immediate problem rather than on a document about the medium term. Third, if the real issue is a person or a management decision rather than a process, an outside observer with a clipboard will not fix it and may make it worse. We would rather say all three on a fifteen minute call than take the booking and find out on the day.

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.