Inventory before you outsource

Every service was running as intended. The list of them did not exist.

An 8 to 10 week sprint, September 2025. A global forest products group, around €10B revenue. Part 3 of 4 in Assembly or Acquisition. Part 1 was the map that has to exist before a standard does. Part 2 was the total nobody had added up. Part 4 is the diagnostic that tells the two problems apart.

The finance function delivered services to the business every day. Nothing was failing, and no individual was asking for help with their own work.

What did not exist was the inventory: a single list of which services the function provided, who performed each one, for whom, and how often.

Every one of the 300-odd services in the final catalogue was already running on day one of the sprint. We discovered no new services. We wrote down the ones that were there.

The record gives the constraint plainly: finance leadership and the business units were already at near-full capacity with daily operations.

An inventory has no owner, precisely because every person already knows their own part of it

Everyone in the finance function knew their own services exactly, and none of them was confused about their own work. That is why the missing catalogue never surfaced as a problem. From any single desk, nothing was missing.

An inventory is a different kind of thing. It needs 300-odd services written down in one format, by one team, at one moment, across 8 business areas that do not share a vocabulary. The same service goes by different names in different areas, and different services go by the same name. That is reconciliation work, and a function running at capacity never starts reconciliation work. It produces nothing this quarter, and you can always postpone it another week without anything visibly breaking.

Put the part 4 diagnostic to this engagement and the answer is unambiguous. Given six uninterrupted months, the team would have had the answer. Nothing was missing from the business. What was missing was protected time, one common format, and somebody whose only job for eight weeks was the list.

311 tasks, and one percentage that only becomes answerable because the 311 exists

The 311 is the deliverable. The 10% is what the deliverable makes possible. You cannot judge which services belong somewhere else against a list that does not exist, because there is nothing to apply the test to. The record states the 10% as identified potential, not as a decision taken or a saving realized.

A finance function that could not describe its own output now has 311 named tasks and a place to start

What that enables. Finance leadership can now say what the function does, who does it, and what could sit elsewhere, in terms every business area recognizes. The catalogue is also the thing any shared-service, automation or outsourcing case has to be built on. Without it, every such proposal is an opinion about work nobody has counted.

Build the inventory before the outsourcing case, not alongside it

Break the work down to tasks, not services. People argue about what a service covers and who owns it. You can count, assign and move a task. The 311 is why the 10% is a defensible number rather than a negotiating position.

Run the workshops inside the sprint. Four steering workshops in 8 to 10 weeks is heavy governance for a short engagement. It also decides whether the catalogue gets adopted or filed, because the business areas that argued over it are the ones that will defend it later.

Treat the catalogue as an operating asset, not a project output. An inventory is accurate on the day you finish it. Give it a named owner and a review date at handover, or within a year it describes how the function used to work and the next team has to build it again.

Decide on outsourcing after the inventory, not before. The expensive mistake runs the other way. Cost pressure arrives first, somebody buys an answer, and the business then cannot act on it, because no one can say which tasks the answer covers.

Four boundaries, and the first is where the remaining value sits

Executing the 10%. We identified the potential against the catalogue. Whether the client outsourced any of it, and on what terms, sat outside the sprint.

Cost per task. The catalogue establishes what gets done and by whom. It carries no unit cost, and a decision about whether to keep work in-house or buy it eventually needs one.

Whether 311 is the right level of detail. Another analyst reading the same interviews could defend 280 or 340. The hard cases are tasks performed differently in two business areas, for reasons that are sound in one and merely historical in the other.

How long it stays accurate. Business areas reorganize and responsibilities move. The catalogue is accurate on the day we hand it over, and nothing attaches a review date to it by default.

SprintlyWorks gave us the clarity and roadmap we needed

That is how the Vice President of Finance put it.

What he does not claim is as telling as what he does. Not expertise the client lacked. Clarity and a roadmap, which is what eight protected weeks and one common format produce when the underlying knowledge already sits in the building.

That is also the honest way to make the case internally, and we recommend using it. On an engagement like this you are not buying knowledge. You are buying protected time and a method. Put that way, the proposal survives its first challenge from somebody who has done the work for fifteen years. Put as a capability gap, it does not.

Next, part 4. Three engagements, one condition: the answer already sat inside the business. The fourth looks identical from the outside and is not. Part 4 sets out the two questions that tell them apart before you scope anything.

The series in one paragraph. Four engagements, one request, two problems. Fleet maintenance, supplier quality and finance services were assembly problems. The evidence already existed, spread across sites in words that did not match, and the client was buying protected time and a method to reconcile it. The machinery catalogue was acquisition. Three of the four things it needed sat with competitors and customers, and no amount of internal time would have produced them. The two questions in part 4 tell the problems apart before you scope anything.

One case record, and one figure on it that we have deliberately left out

The record. All figures come from the SprintlyWorks case record for Standardizing Financial Services Across Business Areas, September 2025: an 8 to 10 week sprint for a €10 billion global forest products group, with more than 25 stakeholder interviews across 8 business areas and 4 steering workshops, producing a catalogue of 311 tasks built from more than 300 services already in operation, and 10% identified as outsourcing potential.

The qualification. We reproduce the 10% as the record states it: identified potential, not a decision taken and not a saving realized.

What we have left out, and why. The record also carries a 4x reduction in ad hoc requests. It states no baseline, so we do not publish it. We would rather show a shorter table than a number a reader cannot check.

What we leave out as a matter of course. We describe the client rather than naming it, and no detail about its service costs, headcount or supplier arrangements appears here.

About this work. SprintlyWorks runs 8 to 10 week sprints for industrial companies that need a written account of how their sites work today, a single harmonized process, or a service catalogue, and cannot release the people who would build it. We work at the sites, reconcile what we find into one structure, and hand over something the client can act on.

Running a standardization programme, or about to scope one? Answer the two questions in part 4 and send us what you get. If it is assembly work, we will tell you what an internal team would need. If it is acquisition work, we will tell you what evidence you are missing.