Service
Automation estate audit and hardening
The workflows already running, made legible and reliable.
Most companies already have automation. It accumulated: a few Zaps, some n8n workflows, a script on someone's laptop, and an API key nobody can trace. It mostly works, until the week it does not, and then nobody can say what ran, what did not, or what it touched.
This engagement makes that estate legible. We inventory everything, trace what each workflow actually does, find the silent failures, and rank the risks by what they would cost you. You get a document you can act on — and, if you want, we do the hardening.
- Platforms
- n8n · Make · Zapier · Cron · Cloud functions · Scripts
- Duration
- Typically one to three weeks, by estate size
- Inventory
- Every workflow, trigger, credential, and destination
- Failure review
- Error history, silent failures, and retry behaviour
- Risk ranking
- By blast radius and business cost
- Cost review
- Platform, model, and infrastructure spend per workflow
- Key-person risk
- What only one person can currently fix
- Output
- Written report, prioritised remediation plan, and estate map
- Optional
- We implement the remediation, or your team does
How it runs
Every stage, in order.
Each stage produces something the next one needs. Where a stage can fail, it fails visibly rather than passing bad data forward.
- 01
Inventory
Every automation across every platform is catalogued, including the ones running on a personal account.
- 02
Trace
Each workflow is followed end to end: what triggers it, what it touches, and what it writes.
- 03
Test
Failure behaviour is probed. The dangerous ones are those that fail without telling anybody.
- 04
Rank
Findings are ordered by what breaking would actually cost, not by how easy they are to fix.
- 05
Harden
Alerting, idempotency, retries, and credential hygiene are put in — by us or by your team.
Scope
In detail.
What the audit routinely finds
10- Workflows failing silently with no alerting
- Retries that duplicate records instead of resuming
- Credentials on a personal account or expired token
- Two workflows writing to the same field with different rules
- Model calls with no spend cap
- Automations nobody can explain and nobody dares switch off
- Test workflows still running against production
- No audit trail for actions taken on customer records
- Hard-coded values that should be configuration
- Single points of knowledge — one person, no documentation
Deliverables
What you get.
Written into the scope document before work starts, and used as the acceptance test when it finishes.
- 01Complete inventory of workflows, triggers, credentials, and destinations
- 02Estate map showing what connects to what
- 03Silent-failure findings — the ones no alert covers today
- 04Risk register ranked by blast radius and business cost
- 05Cost breakdown per workflow, including model spend
- 06Prioritised remediation plan you can execute with or without us
Questions
Asked before.
Do you need production access?
Read access is enough for the audit itself. Remediation needs more, scoped and time-limited, and only if you want us doing the work.
What if we built it all ourselves?
That is the usual case and it is not a criticism. The estate outgrew the way it was built — that is what growth looks like.
Is the report useful without hiring you to fix things?
Yes, and that is a legitimate outcome. The remediation plan is written so your own team can execute it.
Also in Automation
Next step
Scope it before you commit to it.
The first step is a short written scope: fields, volume, schedule, delivery, and acceptance criteria. It is quick, it is concrete, and it tells you whether this is worth doing at all.