What is holding us back?
The next move gets clearer.
Compare opportunities with your team, agree the outcomes that matter and build a roadmap supported by working prototypes.
Usually a measure keeps slipping, and there’s a list of AI ideas nobody can rank.
You might come to us with a strategy to write, a grant to spend or a request for training. Underneath, there’s usually a business problem, and that’s where we start.
What people ask us first
Where do we start?
Why do we keep missing this measure?
Where might AI be most valuable, and where should it not be used?
What’s the business case?
What it looks like day to day
- Cases take longer to close than they should.
- Experts spend their time finding information instead of using it.
- Every function has a list of ideas, and nobody can say which one would move the measure.
How Focus & Align runs.
A small team does the work: a Solutions Director with sector expertise, forward deployed engineers and a software engineer, working alongside your own people. Engineers are there from the first week, so the roadmap rests on something they’ve built.
-
Walk the process with the people who run it.
We interview the people who make the decisions and the people who carry them out, watch the work being done and run working sessions with both.
-
Map the decisions.
For each step we record its job, the decisions in it, who makes them, what they draw on and where the work waits. That includes the judgement nobody has written down.
-
Name the bottleneck.
A decision that waits on one expert, a judgement made inconsistently, information that arrives too late or a hand-off that loses context. We name its owner, its measure and the baseline before anything is built.
-
Score the opportunities with you.
Your team scores every candidate with us on strategic alignment, business value and complexity. Working prototypes go in front of your people while we score.
-
Check the simpler fix first.
If your existing platforms or a simpler technology can solve the problem, that’s where to start. If AI isn’t the answer, we’ll tell you, and help with what is.
-
Agree what comes next.
A roadmap, the business case for the first build and a decision. If you carry on, it’s usually into a Controlled Trial on your own systems.
What you leave with
- A decision map you’ve signed off: your area as jobs, decisions, owners, systems, data and gaps.
- The bottleneck, with its owner, the measure it holds back and where that measure stands today.
- A ranked list of opportunities, with enough evidence of value to choose where to start.
- A roadmap from process fixes to intelligence. Some of the early steps need no build at all.
- The business case for the first build: measures agreed now, targets set once a working system gives evidence to set them against.
A biologics campus narrowed 179 use cases to two approved builds.
A large-molecule biologics campus wanted to close measurable gaps to top-decile performance. We mapped five value streams in the site’s own benchmarking workshops and rated every idea twice: for technical value and for strategic alignment.
- 179use cases, across five value streams and three production units
- 124workflows
- 44strategic initiatives
- 16high-priority candidates, rated highest on both counts
- 2builds the site’s leaders chose to go ahead with
One of the two builds captures maintenance knowledge, with a directional five per cent improvement in technical availability and a path to lift technician utilisation from 50 to 60 per cent.
Three Focus & Align engagements.
We read every corrective action in a device maker’s audit, scored every claims function at an insurer and drew up a roadmap for a whole campus.
- Every corrective action read for an ISO 13485 audit.Our document analysis assessed all 35,000 records in a device maker’s corrective-action list against ISO 13485, clause by clause.An auditing consultancy for medical device manufacturers35,000 corrective-action records assessed, every one of themAbout 100 records a manual review could reach in the time an audit allows700+ non-conformances traced to a single clause
- A biologics campus narrowed 179 use cases to two builds.We mapped five value streams across a biologics campus and turned 179 use cases into a ranked roadmap, with two builds approved by site leaders.A biologics manufacturing campus179 use cases identified across five value streams and three production units44 strategic initiatives, consolidated from 124 workflows16 high-priority candidates, rated highest for both technical value and strategic alignment
- Call summarisation went live first, because 27 other uses depend on it.With a carrier, we scored every claims function in eight weeks, then built four capability foundations in ten. Call summarisation went live first.An international multi-line insurance carrier40–60% of every property claims handler’s shift spent on administration before the work94 use cases identified across every claims function, 19 of them prioritised8 + 10 weeks to build the business case, then four capability foundations
What people ask before we start.
Do we need an AI strategy before we start?
No. There’s no maturity threshold. Choose one area where the problems are clear, and we start there.
Will we just get a strategy document?
No. The roadmap comes from something we’ve built, and your people see working prototypes while we work.
Our data isn’t ready. Can we still start?
Yes. We judge readiness against the one challenge you choose, not in general.
How wide should we start?
Wide and shallow, then deep where the evidence points. Where there are several kinds of decision work, we start with the simplest and most checkable. The complexity of the decisions sets the size of the work more than the size of your organisation does.
Who from our side needs to be involved?
The person who owns the measure, the people who make the decisions in the area, and someone from compliance and from IT early on.
What happens after Focus & Align?
Usually a Controlled Trial on the first challenge, on your own systems. How Build & Integrate works.