Example Audit · Specimen document
Where AI fits in a wholesale business.
Four workflows mapped, sixty three hours a week accounted for, five opportunities weighed, and one recommendation on what to build first.
Example Audit
The document a client receives, in full and on this page. Four workflows mapped to the hour, five AI and automation opportunities weighed against what they cost to build, and one recommendation on what to start with.
This is a specimen. The structure, method and level of detail match what a client receives. The company, its systems and its figures are composites, so the findings could be shown whole rather than redacted. Aivonto.com does not publish client work.
Example Audit · Specimen document
Four workflows mapped, sixty three hours a week accounted for, five opportunities weighed, and one recommendation on what to build first.
Not a list of tools, and not a slide about what AI could theoretically do. A record of how the work runs today, what each part of it costs in hours, and a recommendation you can act on or ignore.
Across the four workflows we mapped, your team spends 63.5 hours a week on work that is largely mechanical: reading documents, retyping what they say into another system, and looking things up to answer a question that has already been answered before.
Roughly 30 of those hours a week can be taken out with technology that exists today and integrates with the systems you already run. Not all at once, and not from every workflow. The bulk of it sits in one place: order intake.
The other finding matters just as much. Two of the things on your own wish list, the customer service inbox and stock forecasting, are not worth building yet. Section 04 explains why, and what would have to change first.
What those hours are, and are not
Recovered hours are not a cost saving on their own. Nobody leaves, and the payroll does not change. What you get back is capacity: two inside sales people who can handle a busier season without a third hire, and quotes that go out the same day instead of two days later. The euro figures in this document are what that time is worth if you put it back to work. Where we quote a payback period, we assume you only manage to use half of it.
Build the order intake assistant first. It accounts for over half of the recoverable time, it touches one system rather than four, and it can run alongside the current process while it proves itself.
The Audit ran over two weeks. Most of what is useful in it came from watching the work happen and asking the people who do it, not from a questionnaire.
How to read the estimates
| Term | What it means here | Precision |
|---|---|---|
| Hours per week | Team total across everyone who touches the step, not per person | Within about 15% |
| Removable | The share of a step a system can take over, with a person still approving the result | A range, not a figure |
| Value | Removable hours at €38, your loaded hourly cost including employer charges | Indicative |
| Effort | Build and integration work, in weeks, before anything goes live | Indicative |
| Confidence | How sure we are, given what we could verify in two weeks | High, medium or low |
What we could not verify. Your ERP supplier had not confirmed API access at the time of writing, so section 07 treats it as an open question rather than a given. The volume sample also falls in September, which your team describes as an average month. If it is not, the annual figures move with it.
Each workflow below is the process as your team described it, not as the procedure says it should run. Where the two differed, we drew what actually happens. Bars are on one shared scale, so a long bar in one workflow is directly comparable to a long bar in another.
Removable: 14 to 18 hours a week. Two thirds of this workflow is reading a document and retyping it. About one order in eight arrives in a format nobody has seen before, and those stay manual either way.
Removable: 6 to 9 hours a week. Pricing stays human. Assembling the document around the price does not.
Removable: 5 to 7 hours a week. The smallest workflow, but the highest proportion removable, because the matching rule is already written down and consistently applied.
Removable: 2 to 3 hours a week. Low, and the reason is in section 04. The questions look repetitive but the answers are not.
The week, totalled
| Workflow | Hours | Removable | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Order intake | 26.5 h | 14 to 18 h | About 60% |
| Quotations | 17.0 h | 6 to 9 h | About 45% |
| Supplier invoice handling | 9.0 h | 5 to 7 h | About 70% |
| Customer service inbox | 11.0 h | 2 to 3 h | About 25% |
| Total | 63.5 h | 27 to 37 h | About 50% |
The pattern across your four workflows is consistent. Where a document arrives in a predictable shape and has to be turned into structured data, automation works well and is cheap to prove. Where the work is deciding something, it does not, and dressing it up as an assistant just adds a screen for someone to check.
Where it genuinely helps
Where we would leave it alone
What would change our mind
The service inbox becomes worth building once order status can be read live from the ERP, because then a draft reply contains a fact rather than a placeholder. That is the same integration the order intake assistant needs, so it may arrive as a side effect. Stock forecasting becomes worth revisiting after roughly eighteen months of clean post migration data, which puts it in 2028 at the earliest.
Everything we found is plotted below on the only two axes that decide the order of work: what it is worth in a year, and what it takes to build. Confidence is carried in the table, not the plot, because an uncertain estimate should not look precise.
| # | Opportunity | Value a year | Effort | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Order intake assistant | €26,000 to €31,000 | 5 to 7 weeks | High |
| 2 | Quote drafting | €12,000 to €16,000 | 4 to 5 weeks | Medium |
| 3 | Supplier invoice matching | €9,000 to €12,000 | 2 to 3 weeks | High |
| 4 | Service inbox assistant | €4,000 to €6,000 | 4 weeks | Low |
| 5 | Stock forecasting | Unknown | 10 weeks + | Low |
The three worth doing
Order documents arriving in the shared mailbox are read, the lines are matched against your article master, and a draft order is prepared in the ERP for inside sales to approve. Anything the match is unsure about goes to a review queue instead of into the system.
Value a year
€26,000 to €31,000
Build effort
5 to 7 weeks
Confidence
High · volumes measured
A request comes in, comparable past quotes are surfaced automatically, and the document is assembled once the commercial manager has decided the price. The decision stays where it is. The forty minutes of assembly around it does not.
Value a year
€12,000 to €16,000
Build effort
4 to 5 weeks
Confidence
Medium · 15 quotes timed
Invoices are collected from mail and supplier portals, matched line by line against the purchase order, and booked for approval. Only mismatches reach a person. The smallest of the three builds, and the one with the cleanest rule behind it.
Value a year
€9,000 to €12,000
Build effort
2 to 3 weeks
Confidence
High · rule already written
Held back, and why
| 04 · Service inbox | The questions repeat, the answers do not. Revisit once the ERP integration from opportunity 01 makes live order status available to a draft reply. |
| 05 · Stock forecasting | Two years of gaps in the sales history from the system migration. Revisit after roughly eighteen months of clean data, so 2028 at the earliest. |
Orders arrive as PDFs and email text in the shared mailbox, and three people spend most of their week turning them into ERP lines. That is the single largest block of mechanical work in the business, and it is the kind of work this technology is genuinely good at.
The week this workflow costs, before and after
How it would work
What it deliberately will not do
Every figure in this document rests on something we either measured, were told, or could not yet confirm. Here they are, separated.
Assumptions
| What we assumed | Basis | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Order volume of about 240 a week | Measured, 3 weeks | Confirmed |
| September is a representative month | Told by the team | Accepted |
| Loaded hourly cost of €38 | Given by finance | Confirmed |
| 46 productive weeks a year | Holiday schedule | Confirmed |
| Your ERP allows order creation through an API or import file | Not yet answered by the supplier | Open |
| The article master is complete enough to match against | Sampled, 12% gap found | Open |
Risks, and what we would do about them
| Risk | If it happens | Likelihood |
|---|---|---|
| The ERP has no usable interface | Fall back to a generated import file, which your team uploads. Adds roughly a week and leaves about 3 hours a week on the table. | Medium |
| Article matching stays below 85% | The review step takes longer than modelled and the saving lands nearer 11 hours than 16. Still worth building, on a longer payback. | Medium |
| The team keeps working around it | The most common reason automation fails. Handled by involving the two people who do the work in the review screen design, not by training them afterwards. | Low to medium |
| A large customer changes document format | Extraction quality drops for that customer until the template is retrained. A day of work, covered under maintenance. | Low |
On the build figure. The €7,000 to €10,500 range is indicative, based on the scope described in section 06 and on the ERP question resolving in the ordinary way. An implementation is quoted at a fixed price in a separate proposal, after those two open items are closed. Nothing in this Audit commits you to it.
The Audit is finished and settled on its own. What happens next is entirely your decision, and stopping here is a normal outcome we have no problem with.
Option A
Everything in this document is yours: the workflow maps, the figures, the reasoning. Your own IT partner can build from it, or you can shelve it. No part of it is locked to us.
Option B
We close the two open items in section 07, then quote the order intake assistant at a fixed price. If either item fails, we tell you before you spend anything on a build.
Option C
Supplier invoice matching is two to three weeks and the cleanest rule of the three. A smaller way to find out whether working like this suits you.
Consulting firm helping businesses through automation, implementation & strategy.
Questions about this Audit
Aivonto.com@gmail.com
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About this specimen
A composite example, matching the structure and detail of a real Audit. Figures illustrate the method rather than describe any one client.
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An Audit of your own workflows, at a fixed fee, booked on its own. It starts with a free call to work out whether there is a case worth pursuing at all.