Not a slide deck of possibilities. A ranked list with a cost against each line and a price against each phase.
Most audits produce a document that describes what a company could theoretically do. That is a survey, not an audit, and it is why the word has a bad reputation among people who run operations for a living.
Three things, and they are all arithmetic
A ranked opportunity matrix: every workflow found during the interviews, scored on what it costs now and what it would cost to fix. A payback estimate against each line, built from the company's own numbers rather than an industry benchmark. A phased roadmap with a price against each phase.
The ranking matters more than the list. Any consultant can produce twenty ideas. The useful output is the one that says which of the twenty to do first and why the other nineteen wait.
Why the interviews are with the wrong people, deliberately
Leadership knows what the business is supposed to do. Dispatchers, coordinators and technicians know what it actually does, including the workarounds nobody has written down. Both get interviewed, and where the two accounts disagree is usually where the money is.
The findings get walked through before anything is scoped, with no deck in the room, and the client reorders them. Sequencing belongs to whoever has to live with it.
Photograph: Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels
