About two hours, total
Roughly ninety minutes with the people who do the work, and thirty minutes at the end to hear the result. Spread over two weeks, not two days.
How we work
Measure first. Build second. Stop if the numbers do not hold.
Most automation projects begin with a signature and end with a business case written backwards to justify it. We do it the other way round. Phase 0 tells you what one process actually costs, before you have spent anything or changed anything.
- R0
- Two hours of your team
- Read only
- Two weeks
The reasoning
Why we give the first phase away
We are early. We do not yet have a decade of client logos to put on this page, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
So instead of asking you to trust a reference, we make a promise you can test at no cost: give us two hours and read only reporting access, and in two weeks we will tell you what one process is costing you. If that number is small, we say so and we stop.
A vendor who will walk away from their own deal on the evidence is telling you something a testimonial cannot. And you keep the measurement either way, which means the worst case is that you learn something about your own operation for free.
What Phase 0 is not
- Not a proof of concept you pay for
- Not an integration project
- Not write access to anything
- Not a change to your system of record
- Not a commitment to a second phase
- Not a sales process dressed as a workshop
Phase 0, in detail
Exactly what happens in the two weeks
So there are no surprises, and so your security and procurement people can read this without having to ask us anything.
Before we start
A thirty minute conversation
We walk you through the working system on synthetic data and agree which single process to measure. We pick one. Measuring five things badly helps nobody.
Week one, about 90 minutes of your time
We map the process as it actually runs
Not as the procedure document describes it. We sit with the people who do the work and follow a case from correspondence arriving to work reaching the right administrator. The gap between the documented process and the real one is usually where the cost is hiding.
Week one to two, no time from you
We measure against your reporting
Read only. We look at volumes, turnaround times and where cases wait. No write access at any stage, and nothing is changed in your environment. If your security team wants the access list in writing beforehand, we prefer that.
Week two, about 30 minutes of your time
We tell you the number
What that step costs a year in hours and in rand, how much of it is realistically automatable given that a person still approves every decision, and what a production integration would involve. Including the parts that would be difficult.
Then you decide
Proceed, park it, or stop
If the value is not there we will say so directly. You keep the measurement and the process map regardless. There is no invoice and no obligation at this point.
What it asks of you
The complete list
Read only reporting access
Enough to see volumes and turnaround times. No write access at any point. Happy to work to whatever your security team specifies, including a supervised session.
One named contact
Someone who knows how the process really runs and can answer questions. Usually a team leader rather than an executive.
That is the whole list. No infrastructure, no licences, no procurement
process, no changes to your system of record, and no budget approval, because there is nothing to
approve.
If the numbers hold
What the phases after it look like
Priced against what the measurement showed, not against what we hoped to sell. Each phase stands on its own and you can stop after any of them.
Pilot
One process, one team
The working system runs alongside your existing process on real correspondence, with a person approving every recommendation. We compare the two and measure the difference honestly, including the cases where it got things wrong.
Production
Integrated properly
Connected to your environment, with the audit trail feeding your record keeping obligations. Your platform remains the system of record. We integrate around it rather than replacing it.
Extend
The next process
The same pattern applies across claims intake, onboarding, estate processing and compliance reporting. Each one gets its own measurement first. We do not assume the second process is worth it because the first one was.
How we behave
Four things we hold to
A person approves every decision
The system recommends. It never decides. Required by POPIA where a decision substantially affects someone, and correct regardless.
Your system stays the system of record
We do not want to be your core platform. We work on the friction around it, which is where the recoverable time actually sits.
We will tell you when the answer is no
If a measurement comes back small, you will hear it plainly. A bad engagement costs us more in reputation than it earns in fees.
Empowerment, not replacement
Work that needs a person still gets a person. What changes is how much of the day is spent searching rather than deciding.
Next step