What is Audit before automate?
Establishing what a process costs and whether it is sound before building anything on top of it.
Automating a broken process makes the breakage faster and harder to see. The sequence that avoids that is: establish what the process actually costs, rank the opportunities against impact, effort and data readiness, redesign anything that is broken, and only then build - instrumented against the baseline you established at the start.
The clearest illustration is a defect-data audit run on a bottling line before any camera was proposed. It found that three failure modes accounted for roughly 90% of the real cost, against twelve listed in the quality manual. Solving those three is what made the business case obvious - and a twelve-mode inspection suite would have cost several times as much to deliver most of the same benefit.
| On this | Audit before automate | Starting at the build |
|---|---|---|
| What exists at the end | A measured before and after | A working system and no way to say whether it helped |
| Most likely outcome | Two or three things built, in the right order | The thing that was easiest to build, which is rarely the thing that mattered |
| Where the cost lands | Two to four weeks up front | Eighteen months in, when the pilot will not scale |
- When it is the right answer
- Every time. The exception is where equivalent work already exists, in which case we would read it and start from wherever it genuinely leaves off.
Start here
If a term here is the one your board paper turns on, ask us about it.
We will send the entry, the evidence behind it, and the honest note about where it does not apply.
You get a reply within one working day, from the engineer who would do the work - not a sales sequence.