Five service areas, delivered in the order that makes them work
Each one is available on its own, and each one assumes the process has been mapped first. Most engagements start with discovery and add the others as the backlog is worked through.
Service areas
Process Discovery and Automation Strategy
Understand the process before committing a line of it to software
A mapped, measured process and a ranked backlog, so the first automation is chosen on evidence rather than enthusiasm.
Most failed automation programmes did not fail at the build stage. They failed because the process that got automated was the tidy version somebody described in a meeting, not the one running in the business, complete with its exceptions, its workarounds and the spreadsheet nobody mentions.
Discovery is a fixed-length engagement that ends the ambiguity. We work alongside the people doing the job, record what actually happens, measure how long it takes and how often it goes wrong, and put a number against the cost of leaving it as it is. Nothing is automated during this phase deliberately, so the decisions that follow are made on evidence.
You finish with an automation strategy you could hand to any competent vendor, including one that is not us. That is intentional. A backlog you can act on independently is worth more than a proposal that only works if we build it.
What is included
- Working sessions with the teams who run the process day to day
- End-to-end process maps covering the happy path and every known variant
- Baseline measurement of cycle time, touch count, volume and rework rate
- Exception catalogue with expected frequency and current handling
- System and data inventory, including access, ownership and integration options
- Automation backlog scored on effort, risk and expected payback
- Target operating model showing which steps stay with people and why
Typical processes
- Order-to-cash across sales, fulfilment and finance
- Procure-to-pay from requisition through to payment run
- Employee onboarding and offboarding across HR and IT
- Customer onboarding and know-your-customer checks
- Claims intake, triage and settlement
Workflow Orchestration
One engine running the work that crosses teams, systems and time zones
The whole process runs in one place, with a status you can query, a policy your team can edit and a change history you can audit.
A process that touches four systems and three departments usually has no single owner and no single place it can be observed. Work moves by email, sits in inboxes, and the only person who knows its true status is whoever chased it last.
Workflow orchestration puts that process into one engine. The sequence, the conditions, the waiting periods, the approvals and the escalation rules all live in a workflow you can look at, and every case running through it has a status you can query rather than guess.
The rules are deliberately kept out of code. Thresholds, delegation matrices, segregation-of-duties constraints and SLA clocks sit in tables that the process owner can read and change under version control, so a policy change is an afternoon rather than a release cycle.
What is included
- Low-code canvas with branching, parallel paths, sub-processes and timers
- Human task steps with queues, delegation, reassignment and out-of-office cover
- Business rules and approval matrices maintained outside the workflow logic
- SLA clocks with tiered escalation and automatic reminders
- Explicit exception paths that park a case with context instead of failing it
- Version control with diffing, staged promotion and one-step rollback
- Separate development, test and production environments with approval gates
Typical processes
- Multi-level purchase and expense approvals with delegation rules
- Contract review and signature routing across legal, finance and sales
- Service request fulfilment spanning IT, facilities and HR
- Credit review and limit changes with segregation of duties
- Case management for complaints, disputes and escalations
Intelligent Document Processing
Structured, validated data out of the paperwork that arrives anyway
Paperwork stops being the bottleneck in an otherwise automated process, and the uncertain cases are the only ones a person sees.
Documents are where most automation efforts stall. The workflow is ready, the systems are connected, and then thirty per cent of the input arrives as a scanned PDF attached to an email from a supplier who has never heard of your integration strategy.
Intelligent document processing handles that input as a first-class part of the process. Documents are picked up from email, upload, SFTP or a monitored folder, classified by type, and the relevant fields extracted and validated against your own master data rather than trusted blindly.
Every extracted field carries a confidence score. Fields above your threshold flow straight through; anything below it goes to a reviewer who sees the document and the extracted value side by side, and their correction becomes training signal. The system is designed to be honest about what it does not know, because a wrong value accepted silently is far more expensive than one flagged for ten seconds of human attention.
What is included
- Intake from email, web upload, SFTP, scanner output and monitored folders
- Document classification and page splitting for batched or mixed files
- Field extraction for structured, semi-structured and free-form layouts
- Table and line-item extraction for invoices, orders and statements
- Validation against your master data, tolerances and matching rules
- Per-field confidence scoring with a configurable straight-through threshold
- Reviewer queue showing the document beside the extracted values
- Full retention of the source document linked to the case for audit
Typical processes
- Supplier invoice capture with two-way and three-way matching
- Purchase order and delivery note reconciliation
- Claims documentation intake and completeness checking
- Identity and proof-of-address verification packs
- Contract metadata extraction for renewal and obligation tracking
Systems Integration and Robotic Process Automation
Connect everything that has an interface, and operate everything that does not
No system is out of reach, and the fragile parts of the estate are isolated, monitored and scheduled for replacement rather than ignored.
Every organisation has two categories of system: the ones you can integrate with properly, and the ones somebody still operates by hand because there is no other way in. A serious automation platform has to deal with both, and be honest about the difference.
For the first category we use connectors and APIs. Authentication, pagination, rate limiting, retries and error handling belong to the connector rather than to a script that one person understands. Events and webhooks let processes start the moment something happens instead of waiting for the next scheduled poll.
For the second we use robots. An unattended robot operates a terminal, a desktop client or a supplier portal the way a person would, on a schedule or on demand, under the same access control and logging as every other step. An attended robot sits alongside a person and takes the repetitive part of their task on request. Robots are the deliberate second choice, not the default, and we design them to be replaced by an API the day one becomes available.
What is included
- Prebuilt connectors for common ERP, CRM, finance, HR and service platforms
- REST, GraphQL, SOAP, SFTP, message queue and direct database access
- Event and webhook triggers for near real-time process starts
- Data mapping, transformation and reconciliation between system models
- Credential management through a secrets vault, never inside a workflow
- Unattended robots for scheduled work in systems without an API
- Attended robots that assist a person inside their existing desktop tools
- Robot resilience monitoring with alerting when an interface changes
Typical processes
- Master data synchronisation between CRM, ERP and billing
- Bulk record creation and maintenance in legacy line-of-business systems
- Supplier and customer portal data retrieval and submission
- Payment file preparation, submission and bank statement reconciliation
- Automated regulatory and internal report assembly from multiple sources
Process Intelligence and Continuous Optimisation
Automation that reports on itself and keeps getting faster
The process reports on itself, so improvement is driven by queue data and reviewed on a schedule instead of waiting for a complaint.
An automated process is not finished when it goes live. Volumes shift, suppliers change their formats, policies get updated, and a workflow that was well tuned in March can be the bottleneck by October. Without measurement, nobody notices until somebody complains.
Every case running through ApexNova writes a timestamped event log. That log is what makes real analysis possible: how long each step actually takes, where cases wait and for whom, how often each exception path fires, and how far the process as it runs has drifted from the process as it was designed.
Continuous optimisation turns that data into a working rhythm. We review the numbers with your process owner on a set cadence, agree the changes worth making, and put them through the same versioned promotion path as the original build. Improvements are measured against the baseline recorded during discovery, so the claim that something got better is a fact rather than a feeling.
What is included
- Live operational dashboards for volume, cycle time and queue depth
- Event-level process analytics with variant and conformance comparison
- Bottleneck and waiting-time analysis broken down by step, team and case type
- Exception rate tracking with alerting when a rate moves out of range
- SLA and deadline reporting with breach forecasting
- Straight-through processing rate measured against the discovery baseline
- Scheduled optimisation reviews with a prioritised change list
- Data export to your own warehouse or business intelligence tooling
Typical processes
- Cycle time reduction across finance close and reporting
- Queue rebalancing in high-volume service and claims operations
- Straight-through processing improvement in invoice capture
- SLA breach forecasting in customer service workflows
- Capacity planning ahead of seasonal or campaign volume peaks
Not sure which of the five you need?
Most people are not, and that is what discovery is for. Bring the process that frustrates you most and we will work out the shape of the engagement together.
