The Data Foundation Scan is a fixed-scope, fixed-fee engagement of two to four weeks. Someone embeds with your programme, asks the questions nobody has written down the answers to, maps how data actually moves, and hands you a Data Readiness Assessment your steering committee can act on.
Transformation offices are given a mandate, a timeline, and a set of targets. What they are rarely given is a data capability. So the programme starts making commitments about throughput, reporting, and automation while the data underneath those commitments has never been mapped. The scan closes that gap in weeks, without hiring for it.
Capacity, throughput, or cost commitments with a date on them, and a programme accountable for delivering against a plan.
Operations, ERP, finance, and asset systems each hold part of the picture. No single person can say which version is the truth.
Every automation, every dashboard, and every agent you deploy inherits whatever is underneath. Unmapped, that is a bet rather than a plan.
One document, four answers. Per system and per critical data flow, in language a steering committee can decide on rather than a technical audit nobody reads.
For each figure the programme depends on, which system holds the version of record, and who answers for it.
Contested ownership, fields that changed meaning, manual consolidation steps, and the places two systems disagree by design.
Which reporting, automation, and decisions cannot be trusted today, tied to the programme commitments they sit under.
The work, sequenced by what unblocks the most, with an honest view of effort. Not a wish list.
| Source | Owner | Source of truth | What it blocks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plant operations | Operations, per site | Contested | Consolidated production reporting |
| ERP | Finance operations | Confirmed | — |
| Asset register | Two teams, no arbiter | Diverged | Maintenance planning, capex forecasting |
| Management reporting | Unassigned | Spreadsheet | Board and investor reporting |
We sit with the people who actually touch the data: operations, finance, asset management, and whoever maintains the reporting nobody wants to lose. The questions are the deliverable's raw material.
Sources, owners, sensitivity, and the real flows between systems, including the manual steps that never appear on an architecture diagram.
We write the assessment, walk your programme leadership through it, and leave you with the sequence. The document is yours whether or not we do the work that follows.
Most data conversations get framed as quality: cleaner records, fewer errors, better hygiene. That framing loses steering committees, because it sounds like maintenance.
The framing that holds is answerability. A programme is asked to defend its numbers to a board, an auditor, and eventually a regulator. That requires one version of each figure, a named owner behind it, and a path back to where it came from. Consistent, trusted, traceable is not a data ambition. It is the condition for being accountable for anything you decide.
The scan ends with a decision, not a proposal you have to interpret. Three routes are normal, and one of them is doing nothing further with us.
You now know where you stand, and your own team executes the sequence. The fixed fee bought a deliverable, not an obligation.
We build what the scan surfaced: ownership, access, structure, and traceability on the paths the work runs on. Your data stays where it is.
Where the gap is the operating model rather than the estate: the delivery structure installed in your team, until it runs without us.
Mapping is a task inside the work. The output is an assessment your leadership can decide on.
We do not arrive with a platform to sell you or a warehouse to migrate into. The scan is about what you have.
Fixed scope, fixed fee, a date it ends on. If it needs to be longer than four weeks, we will tell you before you sign.
Two to four weeks, fixed fee, one document your programme can be held to. Most clients use it to decide what to fund next.