Practices
Five towers. Five numbers that move.
One card per tower: what is broken, what changes, and the metric your board already tracks. Open a card only if you want the workflow, the screen and the delivery detail underneath it.
One resignation, and a capability leaves with the person.
The same question, before and after
Eight of thirty two procedures currently run on one person's memory, which is a resignation risk no dashboard shows. Every answer now carries the clause it came from, and any question with no clause behind it becomes a work item for the process owner instead of a shrug. illustrative of the design
The grid of procedures becomes an operating risk register that shared services has never actually had, and it moves month to month because the procedures are generated rather than remembered.
The workflow, the screen and what we deliver
Where it breaks today
Process knowledge lives in people. The written procedure is out of date the week after it is written, every exception becomes a conversation, and when someone resigns the team loses a capability rather than a pair of hands.
What we do
- Process discovery and mapping, with the control points named
- Shared service design, migration waves and transition governance
- A process knowledge agent that answers from your current procedure and cites it
- Standard operating procedures that stay current because they are generated
- Intelligent ticket routing across the service catalogue
- Productivity baselining and a defensible cost per transaction
What happens to this operation the week your best person resigns?
Every red square is a resignation risk you cannot see on a dashboard. The agent answers from the current procedure and cites the clause, and every question it cannot answer becomes a work item for the process owner. The grid is the operating risk register that shared services never had, and it moves because the SOPs are generated rather than remembered.
Credit notes above 50,000 need a second approval from the regional controller, and the original invoice must be referenced on the credit note. Below that threshold the desk lead can approve alone.
The invoice goes out, and then it gets corrected.
Billing accuracy, checked before issue
Issued as drafted, this becomes a customer query, a credit note, and forty days added to the age of the balance. The check runs before the invoice leaves the building, so the correction is an internal matter rather than a dispute. reason code RATE-VAR
Contract terms are served to the check as live tolerances, so the rate on a draft invoice is compared with clause 4.2 before it is issued, not after the customer disputes it. A credit note is a failure that has already reached the customer.
The workflow, the screen and what we deliver
Where it breaks today
The invoice goes out, and then it gets corrected. Credit notes clean up what the process should have caught, days sales outstanding drifts, and no one can separate the customers who are genuinely late from the ones sitting on a disputed line.
What we do
- Order capture, amendment and eight rule validation before release
- Credit and stock release, allocation, shipment and proof of delivery gating
- Billing accuracy checked before the invoice is issued, not after
- Collections cadence management with a collector desk
- Remittance matching and cash application
- Deduction and dispute management, with reason codes that report
Which of these customers is late, and which is simply in dispute?
The hatched portion of every bar is disputed value. Chasing it does not collect it, it manufactures a complaint, so it leaves the collections queue and enters deductions with its reason code. Move the slider and effort stops following the sort order and starts following value, age and whether the customer kept the last promise they made. The number a chief financial officer cares about is on the left, and it moves.
Cost per invoice is fixed to headcount, so volume is hired for.
What the match actually compares
That is 9.8 per cent over, against the 5 per cent tolerance agreed with this supplier. Held before payment, not after it, routed with reason code QTY-OVER, and the note back to the supplier is drafted from these two columns for a person to read and send. the payment gate never fires
AI reads the document, a deterministic rules engine does the match, and two human gates hold the write and the payment. The ERP is unchanged.
The workflow, the screen and what we deliver
Where it breaks today
Invoices are keyed by hand, three way match is done on a second screen, and the payment run depends on somebody remembering which lines are in dispute. Volume is carried by headcount, so cost per invoice never falls.
What we do
- Intake from mailbox or portal, hashed and de-duplicated
- Header and line extraction with a human verification gate before posting
- Purchase order and receipt retrieval, read only, from your own system
- Deterministic three way match with per vendor tolerance configuration
- Exception routing with reason codes, and drafted vendor replies a person sends
- Payment proposal with a final human approval gate, and freight audit
Moves to the payment proposal. The approver sees the match evidence, not a green tick they have to trust.
Routed to exceptions with a reason code, and a reply to the supplier is drafted from the actual variance.
The angriest key account waits behind a password reset.
One ticket, before and after routing
In one queue the skill that should own this ticket never sees it, and the angriest key account waits behind a password reset. Classified on arrival and routed by intent, value and service level, so the agent opens it with the evidence and a draft already attached. illustrative of the design
What is learned then goes back upstream. A short delivery claim is a fulfilment defect wearing a customer service costume, so it joins the fulfilment trend instead of closing quietly as a satisfied customer.
The workflow, the screen and what we deliver
Where it breaks today
Everything lands in one queue and is triaged by whoever is free. The same forty questions are answered from memory every month, and none of what is learned finds its way back into the process that caused the contact.
What we do
- Classification and entity extraction on arrival, before a human sees it
- Routing by skill, language, value and service level rather than by order of arrival
- Agent assist grounded in your own procedures, with the source shown
- Closed loop customer feedback capture at the point of resolution
- Root cause trending that feeds the upstream process, not a dashboard
- Escalation and exception management with named owners
Who decided that the angriest key account waits behind a password reset?
In one queue, order of arrival decides everything and the skill that should have taken the ticket never sees it. Classified on arrival, the same nine contacts sort themselves by intent, entity, value and service level, and the three hardest arrive with a drafted reply already attached to the order record. The agent edits and sends. What is learned goes back upstream, because a shortfall claim is a fulfilment defect wearing a customer service costume.
The month closes, then a week disappears explaining it.
The same month, explained two ways
The left column is not wrong. It is unfalsifiable, which is worse in front of a board. Every sentence on the right points at a driver and a number, and the movement no driver explains is reported as unexplained rather than narrated. illustrative of the design
The pack reaches the board with the workings attached, and the thirteen week cash forecast rolls forward on actuals rather than being rebuilt by hand every month by the one person who understands the file.
The workflow, the screen and what we deliver
Where it breaks today
The month closes, and then a week disappears explaining it. Commentary is written by whoever has time rather than whoever has context, and the cash forecast is a spreadsheet only one person can open safely.
What we do
- Driver based budgeting, so a plan change is a driver change
- Period close with a balanced journal constraint that cannot be overridden
- Variance analysis with a drafted narrative traced to the drivers that moved
- Thirteen week cash forecast that rolls forward automatically
- Intake to cash conversion, realised foreign exchange on settlement
- Value added tax return preparation and inventory valuation
You have five days to explain this to the board. Who writes the first draft?
The narrative is drafted only from the drivers that actually moved, so every sentence points at a number an analyst can defend in the room. The hatched column is the part no driver explains, and it is reported as unexplained rather than narrated. A finance function loses more credibility to one confident wrong sentence than to an honest gap, so the drafting rule is that silence beats plausibility.
Gross margin is 109k ahead of plan. Volume contributed 312k, of which 214k came from two key accounts recovering after the Q2 shortfall. Input cost took back 264k, concentrated in a single resin grade that moved 11 per cent. Freight absorbed a further 96k against a plan built before the carrier rate change.
Figures shown as modelled come from a fully costed programme design, and in an engagement every line is rebuilt from your own numbers so the saving can be verified rather than believed. Everything marked illustrative shows the shape of the design rather than a delivered result, and is labelled that way everywhere it appears.
Engagement models
Three ways to work with us
The tower decides what we work on. This decides how the commercial relationship is shaped.
Build
A defined system, a defined price and a defined date. Used where the scope can be written down honestly, which is more often than most vendors admit.
Build and run
We build the system and then operate the process on it, with a service level. You buy an outcome rather than a licence and a hope.
Assess and architect
A short, senior engagement that produces an architecture, a control design and a business case you can take to your own board.
Which tower is costing you the most?
Bring the process and the monthly volume. We will show you the workflow we would put under it, and where the human gates belong.