Business architecture and advisory
We help organisations work out how their strategy, processes, data and systems actually fit together, and then use that picture to decide what to change first. Our work ends in documents a board or a bid committee can act on: capability maps, option analyses and roadmaps that name owners and dates.
Approach
Most change programmes look at one of these views and assume the other five will follow. A new system is bought without anyone mapping the process it has to support, or a process is redesigned without asking where its data comes from. We work through all six before recommending anything, and we keep the questions plain so the people who do the work can answer them.
Which capabilities does the organisation need to deliver its strategy, and which of them are weakest today?
We start from the published strategy or annual performance plan and turn it into a capability map, which is a one-page list of what the organisation has to be able to do. Each capability is then rated for how well it is performed now and how much it matters, so investment can be argued from the same page.
How does work actually move from a request to a delivered result, and where does it wait?
We follow real cases through the organisation with the people who handle them, and draw the value stream as it is, including the spreadsheets and phone calls that hold it together. The waiting time between steps is usually where the improvement lies.
Which decisions depend on which data, who owns that data, and can it be trusted?
We list the information each capability creates and consumes, find the system of record for each item, and note where the same figure is kept in two places that disagree. This is the groundwork any analytics or AI work needs before it can be relied on.
Which applications support which capabilities, and where are two systems doing the same job?
Every application is placed against the capability map. Gaps show where staff are working around a missing system, and overlaps show where licences and support contracts can be consolidated.
Is the underlying platform able to carry the plan, and which tools should the architecture itself be kept in?
We review hosting, integration and security at the level a decision needs, and where an organisation wants to maintain its architecture in a dedicated tool, we run the option analysis for choosing one.
Who decides on change, and how will the architecture stay current after the project ends?
An architecture that nobody updates is out of date within a year. We agree with the client who owns each model, how changes are approved, and what the review cycle is, and we hand over the models in a form their own staff can edit.
Services
Four kinds of engagement cover most of what clients ask us for. They can be taken on their own, and they often run in this order.
Capability maps, value streams and operating model descriptions for a department, an entity or a whole group. We use them to show where effort and budget are going today and where they should go, and to give later projects a shared reference so they stop describing the organisation in different ways.
You receive a capability map with heat ratings, current and target value streams, and a short narrative that explains the priorities in plain language.
When there is more than one way to solve a problem, we set out the options, agree weighted criteria with the client before any vendor is looked at, and score each option against them with the evidence recorded. Selecting an enterprise architecture tool is a typical example. We can also draft the request for information that gathers the market's answers.
You receive an option analysis report with the scoring model, the evidence behind each score and a recommendation that a procurement committee can defend.
We help organisations decide which questions their data should answer, check whether the data is good enough to answer them, and write the specification for the analytics or AI models that will. Where models are already in use, we review how they were built, what they were trained on and who is accountable for their output.
You receive a data inventory, a ranked list of analytics use cases and, where needed, a model specification ready to go out to tender.
For manufacturers we work on the link between the factory floor and the finance office: bills of materials, production planning and product costing. A cost price is only as good as the bill of materials and routing behind it, so we start there and make sure stock codes, recipes and planned quantities agree with what is actually made.
You receive cleaned bill of materials templates, a production planning process that the planners have agreed to, and a costing model finance can reconcile. SoftLine MES is an example of this work carried through to software.
Selected work
SoftLine is a manufacturing execution system that Hex Advisory designed and delivered for a manufacturer. It follows a product from its bill of materials to a costed, signed-off job, so the figures finance reports come from what was actually made on the floor.
The design work came first. Hex Advisory worked with the planners and the cost accountant to agree the bill of materials template, the production planning steps and the screens each role would use, and those agreed designs became the specification the system was built to.
That order matters in manufacturing software. When the item codes, recipes and planned quantities are settled before the build, the costing at the end can be reconciled to the stock count, and the system replaces the spreadsheets instead of running beside them.
Engagement
Every engagement follows the same four stages, scaled to its size. Each stage ends with something the client can read and approve before the next one starts, so there is never a long silence followed by a thick report.
We read what already exists, from strategy documents to system lists, and interview the people who run the work. The output is an agreed scope and a list of the questions the project will answer.
We draw the current state across the six views and walk it through with the people who described it, correcting it until they recognise their own organisation in it.
We set out the realistic options, score them against criteria agreed in advance, and show the cost, risk and dependencies of each so the choice is made in the open.
We deliver a roadmap with owners and dates, hand over every model in an editable form, and stay available while the first changes are made.
Company
Hex Advisory is a private company registered in South Africa under the Companies Act, 2008. It holds a B-BBEE certificate issued through the CIPC and has an income tax reference with SARS. The registration certificate, memorandum of incorporation and B-BBEE certificate can be sent with any proposal or tender return.
Where a recommendation leads to new software, Hex Advisory can take the build on as well, as it did with SoftLine MES. The people who drew the architecture then stay involved while it is built, which is where most of the original intent is usually lost, and the client deals with one company throughout.
Contact
The quickest start is a short description of what you are trying to decide and by when. Use the form to put an email together, or write to us directly.
