About
I am not from your industry, and that is the point.
I have spent about twenty five years in manufacturing, including a decade running a machine shop. For the last few years I have built and run software inside a working operation, roughly ten tools that people use every day to do their jobs.
None of that makes me an expert in your practice. You are the expert in your practice. What it does mean is that I have spent a long time watching where work actually gets stuck, and it is remarkably consistent from one business to the next.
What is the same everywhere
The industries look nothing alike. The failures are nearly identical.
- The same information gets entered more than once. Two systems that should talk do not, so a person is the bridge between them.
- Something important lives in one person's head. It works fine right up until they are on holiday, and it is a real problem when they retire.
- Somebody spends their week chasing. Chasing documents, signatures, approvals, answers. Nobody planned that job, it accumulated.
- The software was bought for one thing and is used for another. Half the product is unused and half the work happens in a spreadsheet beside it.
None of that is about AI. It was true before any of this and it will be true after. AI is simply the newest thing being sold as the answer to it, sometimes correctly.
Why I built this as an audit rather than a build
Because I kept being asked to build things that did not need building. Often the honest answer was that a product already existed, or that a setting in the software they already owned would do it, or that the problem was not worth the money it would take to solve.
Saying that out loud is easy when you are paid a fixed fee for the answer. It is much harder when you are quoting for the build, which is why so few people say it.
I do also build things. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest and you would find out anyway. What keeps the audit straight is that the fee is fixed and paid whether the answer is build, buy, switch on, or do nothing. If a recommendation cannot survive you asking whether I am only saying it because I would be the one paid to do it, it does not go in the document.
How to judge whether this is worth your time
Book the call. It is thirty minutes and it costs nothing. Describe how a matter or a client moves through your firm and I will tell you whether there is enough here to be worth paying for. A fair number of those calls end with me saying there is not.