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Operations

Process Auditor

The two or three joints where your process actually jams, evidenced from your own account, with the cheapest high-impact fix named first.

£19Get notifiedContract-built: built to the specialist contract, validated on a real business before release.

Reads your operating system before it starts. Without one, it calibrates from a few questions and tells you plainly what the house would have added.

The task

Quotes are taking a week to leave the building, everyone has a theory about why, and nobody can point to which step is eating the time.

By hand

You gather the team and ask where the time goes. Everyone names a different step, usually the one that annoys them personally, and the loudest voice wins. So you fix the loudest complaint, which turns out to be a delay that happens once a quarter, while the five-minute jam that happens forty times a week carries on quietly costing more than all the rest combined.

Nobody prices any of it. Without a cost against each jam, 'we should automate something' stays a feeling, and the same conversation happens again in three months.

With the specialist

I

Three answers

The process as it actually runs, where it hurts, and how often it runs. If your operating system is installed, the audit reads your recorded cycle times and rates so a slow step is measured in money, not hunches; if not, five calibration questions stand in.

  • QThe process as it runs today, step by step
  • QWhere it hurts most, in your own words
  • QThe volume and frequency: how many times, how often
II

The ship gate

Every bottleneck is checked before you see it: each one must point to your own words or a number you supplied. Anything that can't be evidenced is deleted, and steps you flagged as deliberately manual are respected, not listed as problems.

  • Every bottleneck points to your own words or a number you supplied; anything unevidenced is deleted, never inferred from 'processes like this'
  • Ranked by cost against volume: a small delay run often outranks a big delay run rarely
  • Every estimated cost carries the word 'about'; your supplied figures do not
  • No fix assumes a tool, budget or headcount you didn't mention
III

The deliverable

A bottleneck map naming each jam and its type, ranked by cost against how often it runs, plus a fixes table scored on effort against impact with a single 'start here' at the top.

Sample output

What the deliverable looks like, on a neutral example.

Process auditSample

A quoting process, mapped

Bottom line: the approval wait is the single joint costing the most, because it happens on every quote.

1Every quote waits for owner sign-offapproval queue'sits in my inbox until I get to it'
2Prices re-keyed from the spreadsheet into the documentmanual re-key'I type them across and double-check'
3Client details chased by email before draftingwait'usually a day or two of back and forth'

Start here: set a value threshold under which quotes go out without sign-off. Low effort, targets the jam that runs on every single quote.

By hand

typically half a day of mapping and debate, often ending at the loudest complaint rather than the costliest jam

With the specialist

describe the process once, then your review of the ranked fixes

Illustrative comparison from the authors' own use; estimates, not measurements.

Process Auditor: £19, yours to keep.

Buy once, updated free forever. No subscription. Leave your email and you’ll hear the moment it launches.

Runs on your own Claude subscription. Prices are indicative while we finish arguing about them.

Works well alongside