01
AGGREGATE
Bring the records into one place
Sales against operations. Accounting against job cost. Service against inventory. Field against office. Not every file — the records that describe a real business event.
TMI / STAGE 02 — DATA FOUNDATION
MAKE THE COMPANY
USABLE.
Aggregate, connect, clean, digitise and structure what the company already knows, so that decisions, automation and anything worth calling AI have something solid to stand on. Scoped from the audit. Only what the company actually needs.
WHERE IT ALREADY IS
NOT DATA POOR.
VISIBILITY POOR.
ACCOUNTINGTHE JOB FILESTHE ESTIMATING SPREADSHEETTEXT MESSAGESTHE WHITEBOARDA SHARED DRIVEPAPER TICKETSTHE SCHEDULING BOARDEMAIL THREADSTHE OWNER'S HEADA NOTEBOOK IN A TRUCKTWENTY YEARS OF QUOTES
Almost every established company already has what it needs to make better decisions. It is just spread across a dozen places, half of them not systems at all, and reaching it means asking someone. The information is not missing. It is unreachable. The audit finds where yours is →
WHAT THE STAGE ACTUALLY INVOLVES
SEVEN PIECES OF WORK,
IN THIS ORDER.
Not all seven for every company. The roadmap says which, and it is normal for a company to need three of them properly rather than all seven thinly.
02
CONNECT
Make the systems speak
Integrations and APIs between what the company already pays for, so a customer entered once is a customer everywhere. Most of what gets called an operations problem is a missing connection between two systems that both work fine.
03
CLEAN
Make the records trustworthy
Duplicates, conflicts, abandoned fields, three spellings of the same customer. Nothing built on top of a record nobody trusts will be used, however good the interface is.
04
DIGITISE
Get it off paper
Tickets, drawings, maintenance logs, signed documents, twenty years of job folders. Scanned is not digitised: it has to be findable and machine-readable to count.
05
CAPTURE
Get it out of heads
Pricing judgment, supplier reality, which machine takes a rush job, why this customer gets an allowance. The most valuable records in most companies have never been written down.
06
DECIDE
Name the source of truth
When two systems disagree, which one wins? Until that is answered out loud, every report is an argument. This is a management decision, not a technical one, and TMI will not make it for you.
07
PERMISSION
Decide who sees what
Customer information, pricing, payroll, trade knowledge. Some of what the audit finds should be locked down rather than made searchable, and that gets settled here rather than later.
A model given records nobody trusts does not fail loudly. It produces something confident and wrong. THIS IS THE STAGE THAT DECIDES WHETHER AI IS WORTH ATTEMPTING
See what gets built on it ↗BEFORE YOU START
ABOUT
THE DATA WORK.
- Do we need this before anything else?
- Often, but not always. If the records are already connected, current and trusted, we skip straight to implementation and say so. If the number the owner actually relies on comes out of a spreadsheet one person maintains by hand, nothing built on top of it is worth having until that is fixed.
- Is this the same as buying a data warehouse?
- No, and we would push back on starting there. A warehouse is a place to put things, which is a reasonable answer once you know what is worth putting in it. The work here is deciding what matters, what is trustworthy and what the source of truth is. Tooling comes after that.
- Do you replace our existing systems?
- Usually not. Most companies are paying for systems that would be fine if they were connected and configured for how the work actually runs. Replacement is expensive, disruptive and frequently solves the wrong problem. We recommend it when the system genuinely cannot do the job, and we say which.
- What about AI?
- This is the stage that decides whether AI is worth attempting. A model given disconnected, stale or contradictory records does not fail loudly — it produces something confident and wrong, which is worse. Garbage in does not sound like garbage out any more.
- Who owns the result?
- You do. The records, the connections, the documentation and the structure. It is written so another firm could pick it up, and that is deliberate.
- How much does it cost?
- It is scoped from the audit, because the honest answer depends entirely on what the audit finds. Some companies need very little of this. Some cannot build anything useful until it is done. The audit is $5,000 and tells you which you are.
- Does our data ever get used for another client?
- No. Private client data never moves between clients. General methods and patterns improve how TMI works; your records, pricing, customers and knowledge do not leave your company.
THE STAGES EITHER SIDE
WHAT
SURROUNDS IT.
RELATED READING
WHY THIS
COMES FIRST.
TMI / STAGE 02
FIND OUT WHAT YOU HAVE FIRST.
The audit says whether this stage is necessary and how much of it. Call (337) 450-9795 or book the free Fit Call.