Automation & Workflows
Operational workflows that run without manual handling
We document the processes your team repeats every week, then rebuild them as systems that move data between your existing tools, apply your business rules, and route work to a person only when a decision is genuinely required.
- Typical timeline
- 4 to 8 weeks
- Engagement
- Fixed scope or monthly retainer
- Handover
- Runbooks and full admin access
(01)Overview
What this covers
Most operational cost sits in work that nobody owns end to end: copying records between a CRM and an invoicing tool, checking whether a document arrived, chasing an approval, assembling the same report every Monday. Each step is small. Together they consume a measurable share of your team's week and they fail quietly when someone is on leave.
We start by writing down the process as it actually runs today, including the exceptions people handle by habit. From there we rebuild it as a workflow with explicit triggers, validation, retry behaviour, and an escalation path. The systems you already pay for stay in place; we connect them rather than replace them.
Every workflow we deliver is observable. You can see what ran, what failed, what is waiting on a person, and how long each step took. That record is what makes the process auditable and what tells you where the next improvement is worth making.
(02)Capabilities
Capabilities
The work usually combines several of the following, scoped to the process in question.
- 01
Process documentation and scoping
Structured interviews with the people who run the process, followed by a written map of each step, the systems involved, the decision points, and the volume. This becomes the specification we build against.
- 02
System integration
Connections between CRM, ERP, finance, support, and internal databases using documented APIs, webhooks, or scheduled synchronisation where no API exists. Field-level mapping and conflict rules are defined up front.
- 03
Document and data handling
Intake, classification, extraction, and validation for invoices, purchase orders, contracts, and forms. Extracted values are checked against your records before anything is written downstream.
- 04
Approvals and exception routing
Review queues for the cases that need a human. Each item arrives with the context required to decide, a defined owner, and a timeout that escalates rather than stalls.
- 05
Monitoring and alerting
Run history, failure alerts to the channel your team already uses, and retry logic for transient errors. Failures surface to an owner instead of being discovered weeks later during reconciliation.
- 06
Operational reporting
Scheduled reports and dashboards built on the workflow's own execution data: volume processed, exception rate, time per step, and queue age.
(03)What you get
What you receive
Everything is handed over in your accounts, under your ownership, with no dependency on us to keep it running.
- A written process specification covering current state, target state, and exception handling
- The deployed workflows, running in infrastructure you own and control
- Integration credentials and configuration documented in your password manager
- A monitoring dashboard with run history, failure alerts, and queue status
- Runbooks for the failure modes we identified, written for your operations team
- A recorded handover session plus thirty days of support after go-live
(04)Process
How we work
Four stages, with a written output at the end of each one so you can stop or redirect the work at a defined point.
- 01
1.Assessment
One to two weeks. We sit with the team running the process, record how it works, and measure volume and handling time. You receive a written assessment with the candidate workflows ranked by effort and operational impact.
- 02
2.Design
We specify the target workflow: triggers, data contracts, business rules, approval points, failure behaviour, and the metrics we will report against. Nothing is built until this document is signed off.
- 03
3.Build and pilot
We build in two-week increments and run the workflow in parallel with the manual process on live data. Discrepancies are reconciled and the rules adjusted until output matches.
- 04
4.Cutover and handover
The manual process is retired, monitoring is confirmed with your team, and runbooks are walked through in a recorded session. Support continues for thirty days.
(05)Technology
Technology
We work with established tooling and will use what you already run where that is the sensible choice.
- Orchestration
- n8n
- Temporal
- Apache Airflow
- AWS Step Functions
- Integration
- REST and GraphQL APIs
- Webhooks
- Message queues
- SFTP and flat file
- Data
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- BigQuery
- Snowflake
- Infrastructure
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Docker
- Terraform
(06)Questions
Questions we are asked
Do we need to replace our current systems?
No. In most engagements the existing systems stay exactly as they are and we build the connective layer between them. We only recommend replacing a tool when it has no integration surface at all and is blocking the process, and that is raised during assessment rather than mid-build.
What happens when a workflow fails?
Transient failures are retried with backoff. Anything that cannot be resolved automatically is logged, alerted to a named owner in your existing channel, and held in a queue with the original payload intact so it can be reprocessed once the cause is fixed. No record is silently dropped.
Can our team maintain this after handover?
That is the intent. Workflows are built in your accounts, configuration is documented, and we run a handover session against the runbooks. Teams with an operations or engineering function typically take over directly. Where there is no internal owner, a monthly retainer covers maintenance and changes.
How do you handle access to production systems?
We work with scoped service accounts rather than individual user credentials, request the minimum permissions the workflow requires, and document every credential issued. Access can be revoked at any point without breaking the audit trail.
What if the process changes after you have built it?
Business rules are kept in configuration rather than hard-coded wherever that is practical, so routine changes such as thresholds, routing, and recipients can be adjusted by your team. Structural changes are handled as a scoped change request.
Other services
Start a project
Start with an assessment
A short call to understand which processes are costing the most time, followed by a written assessment you can act on with or without us.