Why the brief comes first
Ask three vendors to quote for automating your order intake and you will get three prices for three different jobs. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because each of them heard a different half-hour of description and filled the gaps with what they usually build.
The brief closes the gaps on your side of the table. It costs an afternoon, and it turns a set of incomparable proposals into a set of comparable ones.
The seven lines
One. The process, in one sentence. From what event to what outcome. "A rental enquiry arrives by phone, WhatsApp or the web form, and ends when the equipment is on a van with a signed agreement." If it takes three sentences, you have two processes.
Two. Volume per week, from a system. Not a typical day - the count for a period long enough to contain a bad week. This is the line that moves a quote most, and the one most often supplied from memory. What to automate first is decided by this number more than by anything else in the document.
Three. Who touches it, and for how long. Roles, not names, and minutes per item rather than a share of a day. Two people at twenty minutes is a different problem from six people at four minutes.
Four. What finished means. The state the process is in when it is done, written so a stranger could check it. This is the acceptance test, and writing it now prevents the version where finished means whatever the delivered system happens to do.
Five. What must never be automated. Refunds above a threshold, anything clinical, anything that goes to a regulator, anything a customer would experience as a machine deciding their case. This is the line vendors leave out and clients turn out to have meant all along.
Six. What it costs now. Hours per week at a loaded hourly cost, plus the rework you can name. Not the whole company - this process. The arithmetic for producing a number you can defend is in the four questions that break most ROI claims.
Seven. What evidence you will accept. The measurement that will settle it in ninety days, and where the number will come from. Agreeing it now is what stops the after-the-fact comparison against a remembered baseline.
What it changes on the other side
A vendor given this document quotes the same job as every other vendor given it. That is the whole point. Where they still differ - approach, sequence, what they refuse - the differences are real ones you can judge, and reading the quote itself becomes a much shorter exercise.
It also tells you something about the vendor. An experienced one will add to line five and argue with line two. One who treats the brief as scope being taken away is telling you where their margin lives.
The version where you do not build
Sometimes the sixth line comes out small. That is a result, not a wasted afternoon: it arrives before a build rather than after one, and the same page is still a written description of one process, its volume and its real cost. The next attempt starts from it, whoever runs that attempt and whenever it happens.
Top comments (0)