Scale Process Design
Fix the process first. Automate it second.
Automating a bad process just produces the wrong answer faster. We map how the work really happens, straighten it out, and only then decide what is worth building.
The service
What is process design?
Our business process design consultancy maps how work really moves through your business.
Almost every business has processes nobody designed. They accumulated. Somebody added a step after a bad week in 2019, somebody else added a spreadsheet, and now that is simply how it is done.
The work is unglamorous and the findings are usually obvious in hindsight. It is also the highest-return thing on this list, because everything you build afterwards is built on top of it: business process automation, API integrations and dashboards.
Systems mapped before they are automated Deliverables
What’s included.
Time spent with the people who do the work, ending in something written down that everyone recognises.
Process mapping
What actually happens, in order, including the steps that are not in anyone’s job description.
Bottleneck analysis
Where work waits and why, ranked by what the waiting costs you.
Workflow redesign
A shorter route with fewer handovers, agreed with the people who have to follow it.
Documentation
Written down properly, so the process survives somebody being on holiday or leaving.
An automation roadmap
What to build, in what order, with the cheap wins first and the reasoning attached.
Why it matters
Most bottlenecks are waiting, not working.
When you time a job end to end, the surprise is rarely how long any task takes. It is how long the work sits between tasks, waiting for an approval, a reply or somebody to notice it arrived.
That is good news, because waiting is cheaper to fix than working. It usually needs a rule and a notification rather than a rebuild or another hire. That is where a business process design consultancy earns its fee, and where business systems automation starts.
See the results →What you get
Process work is judged on what stops happening: the waiting between steps, the approvals that stall, and the handovers where things get dropped.
How we work
Nothing gets retyped
The steps that added nothing are gone, and the ones that remain are agreed with the people who follow them.
Nothing gets forgotten
The process is written down properly, so it survives somebody being on holiday or leaving.
Nothing is a mystery
You get a roadmap of what to build, in what order, with the cheap wins first and the reasoning attached.
How we work
From map to machine.
Map the process
We sit with the people who do the work and write down what actually happens, not what the manual says.
Fix it first
Automating a bad process makes it fail faster. Anything broken gets straightened out before it is built.
Build and connect
The tools you already pay for, wired together, with the gaps filled by something built for you.
Hand it over
Documented, monitored and explained to your team, so the system is yours and not ours.
Our approach
We ask the people doing the job.
Management describes the process as designed. The team describes it as performed. The gap between those two accounts is where most of the useful findings are.
So we sit with the people who do the work. It takes longer than reading a procedure document and it is the only way to end up with a map that is actually true.
Talk it through with us →Keep exploring
More from Scale.
Questions
Frequently asked.
For one process, usually a week or two including the conversations. Whole-business reviews take longer, and we would normally start with the one process causing the most pain.
No. The map and the roadmap are yours, and plenty of clients act on parts of it themselves. It is a useful document even if we never build anything.
Then that is the answer, and we will give it to you. A fair number of the problems we are called in for turn out to be a rule and a shared calendar.
Let’s talk
Ready to find out where the work gets stuck?
Pick the process that causes the most complaints. We will map it with your team and tell you what would actually fix it, software or not.
