A national economic-development agency running an SME grant program
Government / Public Sector
The shape of this problem
The same judgment, made differently every time
The problem
Case officers read several thousand long-form applications in full to check basic eligibility before any substantive review, even though many failed on straightforward checkable criteria. Decision timelines stretched past three months, much of it spent clearing applications that were ineligible for simple reasons.
What we built
We audited a full prior cycle before designing anything and found eligibility rested on a small set of hard, deterministic criteria buried in unstructured text. We scoped the system to eligibility screening only - substantive scoring stayed entirely human - and ran it in parallel with manual screening for a full cycle to prove it never wrongly rejected an eligible applicant before it influenced any real decision.
What moved
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Officer time spent on eligibility screening | † | down 68% |
| Time-to-eligibility-decision | 3+ months | under 6 working days |
| Measured outcome | not measured | Zero eligible applicants wrongly screened out across the validation cycle |
† Measured against the prior level of the same measure. The source publishes the size of the movement, not the figure it moved from.
Officer time spent on eligibility screening
Measured against the client's own prior process, indexed to 100. The source publishes the size of the movement, not the absolute figure it moved from.
Figures are drawn from the practice's own delivery records for the engagement named, measured against the process that preceded it. They have not been through third-party audit, and none is presented as an average across clients.
The condition was simple - it must never reject someone who actually qualified, and they proved that before we let it touch a live decision.Director of Programme Delivery
- Service line
- Document & Request Triage
Partial, and say so in these words - the classification and routing machinery is in production; this specific application would be new. That sentence has never once cost a deal, and asserting otherwise would.
Start here
Which of the four is yours?
Tell us the documents and the monthly volume and we will send the two closest records, with the proof behind each and the honest note where the match is partial.
You get a reply within one working day, from the engineer who would do the work - not a sales sequence.