The Workflow X-Ray: how we find the hours that go missing (formula included)

The sales office has three piles of paper: new requests, the ones “waiting for a price”, and the ones “Mr Giorgos needs to see”. None of them is labelled in hours. The Workflow X-Ray puts that label on. This is the formula it uses.

What a Workflow X-Ray is

A Workflow X-Ray is a fixed-price diagnosis, one to two weeks long, that maps how work really moves through a business, measures the hours, errors and cost at every step, and ends with five automation opportunities with the payback calculated, plus a live demo on your own data.

For factories there is the Plant X-Ray: ten working days on site, adding energy, downtime and quality data and a camera test on one line.

The formula, in full

Four lines. They appear in every report we write, so your finance director can check them one by one.

Volume

How many times a month the task happens, taken from the ERP, the inbox or the document census.

Minutes per task

The median time from stopwatch readings at the desk. Never a guess from memory.

Share completed with no human touch

Items that go through with no correction at all. Exceptions count as zero saving. For reference, 19.9% of supplier invoices need exception handling on average, against 11.8% at the best performers (Ardent Partners via Medius, vendor-published research).

Minutes of human review

Items processed automatically × the minutes someone still spends checking each one. Always subtracted.

Hourly labour cost

Yours. If we don’t have it, Eurostat’s figure for your sector: €18.20 in manufacturing, €28.30 in transport, €19.00 in accommodation and food, €16.00 in trade (Eurostat 2025, official statistics).

Two things are left out on purpose: errors avoided and revenue recovered. We measure them on separate lines, only once we’ve seen them in your own data, and we never add them in to make the headline bigger. Every formula we use is on the Method page.

A worked example, every number shown

A plant in Magnesia receives 1,500 supplier invoices and delivery notes a month. Stopwatch readings give 6 minutes per document. example

Example: supplier documents · use case

Step	Calculation	Result
Hidden hours	1,500 × 6 ÷ 60	150 hours/month
What they cost today	150 × 12 × €18.20	€32,760/year
Share with no human touch	conservative ↔ ambitious	70% ↔ 85%
Review per automated document	a person glances at it	0.5 minutes
Hours freed	(1,500 × 6 × 70–85% − 1,050–1,275 × 0.5) ÷ 60	96–117 hours/month
Labour value	96–117 × 12 × €18.20	≈ €21,000–25,500/year
People back on real work	hours ÷ 160	≈ 0.6–0.7
Payback	€15,000–25,000 one-off, €400/month to run (typical range)	≈ 9–19 months

Three things to take away. First, 150 hidden hours free up 96–117, not 150. Second, on labour alone the payback is 9–19 months. If a project only adds up once errors and lost revenue are counted, those have to be measured before anyone proposes it.

Third, here AI takes over 64–78% of one task, not of anyone’s job. In a US survey, people using generative AI reported saving 5.4% of their working hours on average (St. Louis Fed, self-reported). That covers the whole working day, not a single task. If someone promises that AI will do half of everyone’s job, ask to see the stopwatch readings.

How we measure without asking “how long does it take you?”

Nobody knows from memory how many minutes a delivery note eats. So the X-Ray rests on five sources:

1. A stopwatch at the desk. We sit beside the people who do the work and time real repetitions. We keep the median and record how many readings we took.
2. A document census. What arrives, how often and from where: invoices, delivery notes, quotes, certificates.
3. ERP timestamps. From order to delivery note and from delivery note to invoice, the gaps show where work sits waiting. It’s a lightweight form of process mining.
4. Metadata, not content. From email, Viber and the phone system we keep counts and times: how many messages, when, how many missed calls each hour.
5. The people who know. One conversation with whoever “knows how it’s done”. Often, that person is the bottleneck as well.

We don’t ask how your process works. We read it from your data.

Ten working days, from stopwatch to demo

1. Day 1. Kick-off with management: which processes are in scope, and who “the people who know” are.
2. Days 2–3. Stopwatch and photos at the desks.
3. Day 4. Document census, ERP exports, metadata.
4. Days 5–6. The process as it is, not as it’s described: where it waits, where it loops back, where it gets retyped.
5. Day 7. Hours, euros and errors at every step, and every opportunity scored on value, feasibility and time to value.
6. Days 8–9. A small demo on your own material, for example 20 of your real invoices, posted automatically.
7. Day 10. A readout with the owner or GM and the finance director.

You leave with five deliverables you keep whatever you decide: the Hours-Leak Map, the top five opportunities with payback and risk (three for Compact), a live demo, a 90-day roadmap with a funding annex and an AI Act, GDPR and security checklist, and the readout itself.

Want to see how it looks in other trades? The X-Ray page keeps an archive of eight example X-rays, from an olive mill to a law firm.

Prices and terms

X-Ray sizes · prices excluding VAT

Size	For	Duration	Price
Scan call	Any business	45 minutes, online	Free
X-Ray Compact	Up to about 10 people, one process	1 week, remote, with one visit	€890
Workflow X-Ray	SMEs, up to three departments	2 weeks	€1,900
Plant X-Ray	Manufacturing plants	10 working days on site	from €4,900

The fee is credited in full against a pilot signed within 60 days of the readout. We sign an NDA before we see anything, and ask only for the data the measurement needs.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a Workflow X-Ray cost?

The 45-minute Scan call is free. X-Ray Compact costs €890, the Workflow X-Ray €1,900, and the Plant X-Ray starts from €4,900, all excluding VAT. Sign a pilot within 60 days of the readout and the whole fee comes off its cost.

What do you need from us?

A few hours with each role we shadow, one kick-off meeting and one readout with management. Read access to ERP exports, sample documents and, if you keep them, call logs. You don’t need to prepare anything.

Will you see sensitive data?

As little as possible. From email and Viber we keep metadata, meaning counts and times, not content, unless you hand us samples. We sign an NDA, processing happens in the EU, and the data is deleted after the readout unless we carry on together.

What if you find nothing?

Then you know it in numbers, and you know where not to invest. That’s why the free 45-minute Scan call comes first: if we don’t see enough volume to justify an X-Ray, we tell you before you pay anything.

Do we have to carry on with you?

No. The deliverables are yours, and you can build them with anyone you like, or on your own. If you carry on with us within 60 days, the whole X-Ray fee comes off the cost of the pilot.

Sources

1. Eurostat, Labour cost levels (lc_lci_lev), 2025 · official statistics
2. Ardent Partners, Accounts Payable Metrics that Matter 2026, via Medius · vendor-published research
3. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity, February 2025 · research, self-reported US data