Process optimisation and automation
Less waiting. A better-run business.
We improve the processes that slow your business down. Measurement, organisation and AI automation, brought together to make change work in practice.
Today
Illustrative, not an implementation result. At your place we measure the process from scratch.
Explore the process steps
- Enquiry arrives
- Waiting to be assigned
- Gathering facts and sign-off
- Preparing the quote
- Waiting for a decision
- Revisions and a second version
- Doing the work
- Waiting to be invoiced
- Closing and billing
Every business has a process
- Manufacturing
- Logistics
- Back office
- Customer service
01The starting point
Sound familiar?
People are working. Systems are running. Yet work still stands still. We look for the cause between the steps of your process.
The plan is fine. What comes out is not.
The schedule is made in one place and the work happens in another. Nobody can point to the moment a job loses a day.
The data is in five systems and one spreadsheet.
The monthly report takes three days because somebody stitches exports together by hand. There is one such somebody, and they are about to take leave.
The pilot worked. The rollout never happened.
The tool proved itself in one team and stayed there. What was missing was not technology but a person accountable for taking it across the company.
02How we help
From the right diagnosis to lasting change.
We fit the scope to the problem, not the other way round. Each of our four areas of work leaves you with something tangible.
- 01Process audit
We map the route a job takes end to end — an order, a purchase request, an application, a complaint — time it, and show where it stands still and what that costs.
What stays with you
A list of actions ranked by effect and cost — not a report for a drawer.
- 02AI automation
Language models and machine learning where a repeated decision or a document is eating people's hours: quoting, order and invoice handling, planning, quality control, reporting, first-line customer contact.
What stays with you
A working system on your data, with someone on your side who can keep it running.
- 03Restructuring
Reshaping a department or a whole company: roles, accountability, how decisions travel, and the measures that show the change is holding.
What stays with you
A new division of work, implemented with the people who will still be there afterwards.
- 04Rollout and training
Work standards, training for managers and their teams, and handing the capability to whoever carries it on.
What stays with you
A company that in six months does not need us to keep the change alive.
03Our approach
Understand first. Then change.
Four stages, in this order. Measurement always precedes diagnosis — skip it and you are advising your own hunches.
How it runs over time
- 01days 1–3
Measure
Two to three days at your place. System data, walking the process step by step, and conversations with the people who run it. No assumption about where the problem is.
- 02weeks 2–3
Diagnose
Bottlenecks and losses, each costed in money or in hours, ordered largest first.
- 03from week 4
Implement
Work done at your place, alongside your people and your systems. Changes staged so the day job keeps running.
- 04alongside and after
Make it stick
A written standard, a measure, and a named owner. Without those three the change unwinds within a quarter — which is the usual reason a second audit reads like the first.
04The approach in practice
Not working faster. Losing less time.
Illustrative scenarios, not delivered engagements. They show how we think about processes, not our track record or a promise of results.
Component manufacturer, ~140 peopleProcess audit
18 → 11 days
Lead time from order confirmation to dispatch. Not one operation was made faster — a duplicate approval and a wait for batch release by QC were removed.
Technical distributorAI automation
3 days → 4 hours
Producing the monthly report, previously stitched by hand from four exports by one person. A model reads the documents; a person approves the exceptions.
Field service operationRestructuring
5 → 2 handovers
How many times a ticket changed owner before somebody closed it. Every handover was a place the job waited for someone's attention.
Run it on your own process
Three numbers you either know or can estimate. The result comes from Little’s Law — arithmetic on your data, not a promise from us.
orders, requests, applications, tickets
days from start to close, as the customer sees it
what share of that time the job simply sits
−6.3 days shorter on every job
- Days of waiting per year
18,144days
summed across every job in the year
- Jobs open at any moment
71jobs
Little’s Law: throughput × lead time. You can count this one in your own system and check it.
A model, not a forecast. It assumes a first pass removes half the waiting and not one minute of the real work — deliberately conservative, since the lean literature puts the available room far higher.
FactsThree numbers that describe the starting point in most companies. Not our results — published research, with the source named.
Poland sits near the bottom of the EU. That is not a criticism of Polish companies — it is a description of a market where the advantage is still there to take.
% of enterprises with 10+ employees, 2024
- Denmark27.6
- Sweden25.1
- Belgium24.7
- EU average13.5
- Poland5.9
- Romania3.1
Source: Eurostat, “Use of artificial intelligence in enterprises”, 2024 data
Which is why a project ends in a working change with a named owner rather than in a document being signed off. The “make it stick” stage exists for exactly this.
% of programmes surveyed
- Met their goals
- Some value, short of target
- Little or nothing
Source: McKinsey & Company, “Losing from day one”, 2021
1–5%
The rest is waiting, being moved, stored, counted or inspected. This finding is the foundation of lean management, and it is what the strip at the top of this page draws.
Source: J.P. Womack, D.T. Jones, “Lean Thinking”
Prime Consulting EMEA
Practice, not just perspective.
- Process first, tool second
- Automating a bad process gets you the same bad result, faster.
- A number, or nothing
- Every recommendation carries an estimated effect and cost. Where we cannot estimate them, we say so.
- Implementation, not a deck
- A project ends with a change working at your place, not with a document being signed off.
Prime Consulting EMEA is a consultancy that grew out of a shop floor rather than a boardroom. But a process is a process: the same method — measure it, cost it, remove it, make it stick — works the same on an assembly line, in an invoice approval chain and in a service queue.
Behind the services is experience running production and optimising processes in international industrial plants — consumer electronics and automotive — and in preparing people to work with Industry 4.0 technology alongside vocational education.
We work across Poland and the wider EMEA region, in Polish and in English.
Before our first conversation
Good to know.
How long does it take?
An audit runs two to three weeks, counted from the first day at your place to the list of actions. Implementation depends on scope and is agreed after the diagnosis — quoting it earlier would be guessing.
Does this work outside manufacturing?
Yes, and that is often where the most is to be had. The method describes the route a job takes through an organisation, not machinery — document flows, quoting, order handling, complaints, HR processes. The vocabulary and the systems differ; the way of working does not.
Do we actually need AI?
Often not. A large share of the losses we find disappear when the work is organised differently, with no software at all. We propose AI where a repeated decision or a document genuinely eats people's hours — and we say when it does not pay.
What happens to our data?
An NDA before the first day of work. We process data only within what is agreed in writing, we do not use it outside your project, and it does not go into training models.
How is this billed?
The audit is a fixed fee, known before we start. Implementation is billed as consulting days or as a monthly rate for running the project. We give ranges on the first call, before any proposal.
Remote or on site?
Diagnosis is always on site — a process cannot be measured over the phone, because most of the time is lost exactly where nobody writes it down. Implementation is mixed: present when the work requires it, remote for the rest.
Do you work with smaller companies?
Yes. The threshold is not company size but whether there is something to measure: a repeatable process, and someone on your side who will carry the change on.
Book a call
Let's start with your process.
Describe the process that is causing trouble. We reply within two working days with a first read — not a proposal.