Engagements and pricing
We do not sell developer days. We sell a specific business improvement, delivered by a senior engineer working inside your operation, and we put the before-and-after figure in the proposal.
Engagement one
£5,000 + VAT, fixed, five days
A senior engineer spends five days inside your operation: on the shop floor, in the office, with the planners, estimators, engineers, and administrators who make the business run. Not a questionnaire, not a workshop. Watching the real work, following real orders through real systems, and counting the hours and the errors as they happen.
The audit covers how work moves between your sales, design, production, stock, purchasing, field, and accounting systems, which steps are done by hand, where data is retyped, and where the figures disagree. Every finding is costed in staff hours and error consequences, and every proposed fix is sized honestly, including the ones that are not worth doing.
Good fit when
You receive
How the five days run
Day one: follow the order
Trace real orders from enquiry to invoice, across every system and spreadsheet they touch.
Days two and three: sit with the people
Time the manual steps, collect the workarounds, and find where the data disagrees.
Day four: check what is possible
Test the integration points on your actual systems, so the plan is grounded in what they can do.
Day five: the plan
A costed, prioritised plan presented to the leadership team, with the arithmetic shown, and a working prototype of the top fix where it is small enough to build in the week.
Engagement two
Fixed price quoted against the result, four to eight weeks
One specific bottleneck, eliminated. Usually it is the top item from an audit: purchase orders read and keyed by hand, a bill of materials that has to be retyped from CAD into the ERP, stock figures that never agree with the warehouse, job sheets that take a day to get from the field to the invoice.
The engineer who did the audit builds the fix, inside the business, against your real data and your real systems. The first working version is in front of the people who use it within weeks, and it is refined with them until it is simply how the work is done. The price is fixed against the scope and the result the proposal names. Smaller, tightly scoped jobs are quoted separately.
Typical sprints
You receive
How a sprint is priced
Worked example: an office spending 40 hours a week on rekeying and chasing, at £25 an hour, is spending around £52,000 a year of staff capacity. A sprint that removes most of it pays for itself inside the first year and keeps paying after that, provided the business redeploys the time. We will tell you if the arithmetic does not work.
Engagement three
Fixed monthly fee with defined capacity, three-month minimum
Most businesses do not have one bottleneck. They have a queue of them, and once the first is gone the next becomes visible. The partnership turns improvement into a standing arrangement: an agreed monthly backlog of automation and integration work, support for everything already deployed, and senior technical judgement on call for the decisions that come up in between.
It also covers the oversight an operational business needs but rarely has in house: reviewing vendor proposals, keeping an eye on the AI tools staff are already using, and making sure the systems keep up as the business changes. Each tier includes a defined number of delivery days a month, so the capacity is known in advance.
Included each month
Good fit when
Why a partnership, not a project
Projects end, and the knowledge leaves with the team. A partner keeps the context: how your BOMs are structured, which supplier sends the awkward invoices, why the stock figure drifts on a Friday. That context is what makes the second and third improvements cheaper than the first.
It is also how the systems stay yours. Everything built is documented, handed over, and supportable by someone else, so the partnership continues because it is worth it, not because you are stuck.
Related
For leadership-only arrangements without a delivery backlog, see Fractional CTO.
Talk about a PartnershipWhich one?
It is the cheapest way to find out what the real problem is, and the plan is yours whatever you decide next. The exceptions are below.
Start with the audit if
You know something is costing you but not what, or how much. You have several candidate problems and want them ranked. Or someone is trying to sell you new software and you want an independent view first.
Go straight to a sprint if
The bottleneck is already obvious and measured, the systems involved are known, and you want it gone this quarter. A short scoping call replaces the audit.
Start as a partner if
You already have a backlog of small improvements and no one senior to own it, or you are between a sprint finishing and the next one being chosen.
Why weeks, not months
Most of what an operational business needs has been needed before: reading supplier documents, posting to accounting systems, keeping BOMs and stock in step, routing approvals with an audit trail. Provolve maintains a library of these components and reuses them wherever they fit, so a sprint spends its weeks on the part that is genuinely specific to you.
Who owns what
Questions
No. Each engagement has a fixed price or a fixed monthly fee, agreed against a defined scope and a measurable result. Scope changes are discussed openly and repriced, rather than absorbed into a growing timesheet.
Then the report says so, with the reasons. The audit is a fixed-price diagnosis and the plan is yours whether or not you take it further. In practice most operational businesses have at least one bottleneck where the arithmetic is clear, and the audit's job is to rank them honestly, including the ones not worth touching.
Usually not. The cost usually sits in the gaps between the systems you already own. Where a new system genuinely is the right answer, the audit will say so, with the reasons and the numbers, and Provolve has no resale arrangement with any vendor.
Against a baseline taken during the audit or the scoping call: hours spent on the manual steps, errors and corrections per week, and lead time from one end of the process to the other. The same figures are collected again after deployment, with you, and written up so you can use them internally.
In two places. Inside the systems, where it reads documents, classifies, extracts, and drafts, always with a person checking anything that would be expensive to get wrong. And in how the work is built: AI-assisted engineering is how a Provolve engineer delivers in weeks what used to need a team, and that is what makes fixed prices possible.
Primarily UK manufacturing and industrial SMEs, followed by field service and logistics. Twenty-five years of ERP, MRP, WMS, and field-service systems means the systems your business runs on are familiar territory rather than a discovery exercise billed to you.
A five-day Operational Friction Audit finds out, and leaves you with a costed, prioritised plan whether or not you take it further with us. Book a short call to see if it is the right starting point. If it is not, you will be told that.