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The Operations X-ray
A fixed-fee X-ray of one high-value process, run on your own operational data. Not a benchmark. Not a workshop. Your actual process, reconstructed from the record your systems already keep.
You finish with a ranked list of what is costing you money, what it is worth in dollars, and what to do about it first.
Every purchase order, work order, approval and service ticket leaves a timestamped trail in your ERP, EAM and service tools. Process intelligence reads that trail and rebuilds how the work actually ran — every case, every step, every detour, every time it went round again.
That matters because the process on the wall chart and the process in the system are rarely the same thing. Workshops capture what people believe happens. The event log captures what did happen, across every case, with no recall bias and no sampling.
The X-ray takes that reconstruction and answers five questions a board or an executive team can act on.
What we look for
Same three weeks, same single process. We read it through five lenses, because the same event log answers all five. Every answer comes back with a number attached and a named owner.
Money lost inside the process itself — not in the budget line, in the running of the work.
"Eleven per cent of invoices were paid without a matching goods receipt, and 0.6% were paid twice — because the receipt was posted after the invoice cleared."Example of a finding, procure-to-pay
Conformance. The designed process is compared against every real case, and we count the departures.
"Capital requests were split into two below the $250k delegation limit in 34 cases, which moved approval two levels down."Example of a finding, capital approval
Automation applied to a broken process makes the mess faster and harder to see. This lens separates what is ready from what is not.
"Sixty-eight per cent of service requests followed four paths. The remaining 32% followed 190. Automate the four; redesign before touching the rest."Example of a finding, service request to resolution
Most ERP value is lost after go-live, quietly, as people build workarounds. This lens finds them.
"Three-way match was disabled for 40% of vendors. Approvals for those vendors were happening in email and re-keyed the next day."Example of a finding, procure-to-pay
Benefits management fails for a boring reason: nobody set a baseline, so nobody can prove the change worked.
"The business case claimed a 15% cycle-time reduction. No baseline was ever captured, so the benefit could be neither proved nor disproved."Example of a finding, benefits review
What it looks like
The chart on the left is the process as designed. The chart on the right is the same process as the event log records it, over roughly nine thousand cases.
Scroll the diagram sideways to see all three departures.
Finance sees one number for what a process costs. The event log splits that number into the part that produced something and the part that did not.
Start to finish
A worked example on procure-to-pay, from the data we take to the decision it supports.
Illustrative — figures are realistic placeholders, not a client result.
Lens 03 in practice
Before you put an agent or a bot on a process, you need to know how many different ways that process is actually performed. Where the work is concentrated on a few paths, automation is straightforward and the payback is quick. Where it fragments into hundreds of one-off routes, automation just encodes the chaos.
The X-ray gives you that split as a number, so the automation decision stops being a matter of opinion.
Lens 04 in practice
ERP business cases assume the benefit curve keeps climbing after go-live. In practice it flattens, because the organisation reverts to workarounds that were never meant to be permanent — a match switched off, an approval moved to email, a step done in a spreadsheet.
Because those workarounds live in the event log, the gap can be measured rather than argued about, and each contributing cause can be named.
Lens 05 in practice
Most benefit registers break in the same place. A financial target is set, a project is delivered, and nobody can connect the two, because the operational metric in between was never measured before the change.
The X-ray fixes that by working backwards. Each committed benefit is traced to the process metric that would have to move for it to be true, and that metric is baselined from the event log — including for the period before the change, because the historical record is already there.
Scroll the diagram sideways to see the full chain.
One process, chosen with you from a short menu:
Everything else is deliberately out of scope. One process, one X-ray — that is what makes three weeks credible. If a second process matters, it is a second X-ray, not a longer one.
Six deliverables. All of them short, all of them evidenced, none of them a slide deck about methodology.
We agree the process, the data path and the fixed fee. Sixty minutes, no obligation.
The minimised event log is prepared, in your environment or under NDA. The three-week clock starts here.
We reconstruct the real flow, measure conformance against the approved process, and rank the leaks by value at stake.
A one-page executive readout and a findings session with the people who can act on it. Three weeks, fixed.
In your environment — nothing leaves your boundary. This is the default for defence and SOCI-regulated operators. Alternatively: a minimised, de-identified extract under NDA, held and processed in Australia, destroyed on completion.
A minimised event log — when things happened, not what was in them. Typically four columns: case ID, activity, timestamp, role. No personal data, no commercial terms.
Read-only. Never connected to live or OT systems. Nothing is written back, and no agent or automation is deployed during the X-ray.
A single fixed fee, agreed on the scoping call and confirmed in writing. If you proceed to Value Diagnostic & Delivery within 90 days, the X-ray fee is credited in full.
No variations, no time and materials, no scope creep — the scope is one process and the duration is three weeks.
Sixty minutes to agree the process, the data path and the fee. If the data is not there to support an X-ray, we will tell you on that call rather than after you have paid for one.