07 One task, specified from what goes in to who confirms it.
A specific task is defined by its boundaries: one type of input, one transformation, one destination in your software and one person who signs it off. Those boundaries are set in writing before anything is built, and the task is accepted, maintained and measured against them.
The task specification
The specification is the technical contract of the task. It is drafted with real examples from your company and serves as the reference for the price, acceptance and maintenance.
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01 Input
Source channel and format, expected volume and frequency, and a real sample that covers the known variants, including the difficult cases.
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02 Transformation
The rules that are applied and the exact step at which a model comes in. Matching by code or reference, unit conversions and calculations are handled by deterministic code; the model is reserved for interpreting what arrives without structure.
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03 Output
The object the task produces, defined field by field in a schema. Each value keeps the reference to the line, cell or element it comes from.
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04 Destination
Where it is written, by which route and in what state: through the program's API or its file importer, as a draft, as a record pending confirmation or as a final record.
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05 Confirmation
Who confirms, what they see when doing so, with doubtful lines and discrepancies already flagged, and what happens if they reject it. The approval is logged with its author and timestamp, and only then does the output become final in the destination.
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06 Acceptance criterion
One main indicator with its measurement method, and a suite of real test cases that the task must pass before going into service and again after every change.
Four tasks, specified
Four examples, each with its specification in summary. Orders and price lists are read with the document chain of Processes and documents.
Orders from a mailbox, as drafts in the ERP
Input: the emails in the orders mailbox, with the order in the body of the message or in an attached PDF.
Output: a draft sales order for each order received, linked to the email it comes from.
Destination: the ERP, in the status it reserves for unconfirmed orders, through its API or its importer.
Confirms: the person in charge of orders, who corrects or accepts each draft before it becomes a firm order.
Supplier price lists, loaded into the ERP
Input: the price lists of the suppliers included in the specification, in PDF, Excel or CSV, each supplier with its own parsing template.
Output: your ERP's import file and the change report against the current price list.
Destination: the item master.
Confirms: purchasing, on the change report and before the load.
Hours per project, joined to invoicing
Input: the timesheet the team already fills in and the invoices issued, read from the ERP with read-only access.
Output: per project, the hours booked against the hours budgeted and the amount invoiced, with an alert when the variance exceeds the threshold you set.
Destination: a dashboard per project.
Rules: matching is done by project code, with a mapping table for codes written in different ways; the calculation is entirely deterministic.
Reviews: the manager of each project, on the variances flagged.
From the BIM model to the estimating software
Input: the IFC export of the model, with the quantities of each element (lengths, areas, volumes or unit counts) and its classification by type.
Output: a BC3 file in FIEBDC-3 format, with chapters, line items from your price database and measurement lines that identify the source element. Elements with no match or no quantity are listed separately and, at each revision of the model, the measurements that change are flagged.
Rules: the correspondence between element types and line items is kept in a mapping table that your team can review.
Confirms: the person responsible for estimating, before the file is imported.
Fixed price, maintenance and growth
What sets the fixed price
The price is calculated on the specification: the channels, formats and input variants it covers, the transformation, the destination and the acceptance criterion. What the specification sets out is exactly what is delivered and accepted.
What the monthly maintenance covers
The task is monitored by its output: the units processed in each period are compared with those expected. Any adjustment, whether due to a change in the input format, in the destination software or in the model version, is run against the test suite again before it goes into service.
Ready to become part of a larger system
The task logs its activity with the same event schema as a complete system and shares the model layer, the per-company credentials and the isolated environment. What is built for it, such as the ERP connector, the mapping tables for customers, items or line items, and the test suite, is reused in the next task.
Results and how they are measured
Each task is measured before and after with the same method: the same unit, the same source and a sample period equivalent to that of the diagnostic baseline. The result goes into the monthly report.
- Main indicator: the one set in the specification, such as minutes per order entered, working hours per price list loaded, projects with a variance detected before closing, or the hours needed to transfer the measurements into the estimate.
- Re-keying: the number of times the same piece of data is typed into two programs, before and after.
- Confirmations without changes: the proportion of outputs approved exactly as they were prepared, and the fields corrected most often, which show which rule or which table needs adjusting.
- Errors in the destination: those that have to be put right after entry, such as duplicate orders, hours booked to the wrong project or misassigned line items.
- Cost per completed unit: spending on models and services divided by the units the task completes.
- Continuity: the task's incidents and their resolution time.
Shall we bring your company up to date?
We start with a 30-minute call to understand your case and explain what the diagnostic consists of and what it costs.
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