How much time goes into holding the work together?

We call it bridging work: the hours people spend carrying information between systems that don't talk to each other, and between people who can't see each other's queues. An emailed order typed into the system. Two spreadsheets that should be one. A payment chased by phone. The month-end pack built by copy and paste.

Added up across a business, it's a debt. Workaround debt: the running cost of every gap that was patched by a person instead of fixed. We want a number for it, by sector and by size, for South Africa.

From what already exists. Published labour and business statistics, occupation data, and the patterns that show up in how South African employees describe their own jobs. No survey decides the headline figure. Every assumption is written down, every range is shown, and the whole model is published so anyone can check it.

Where we have our own evidence, from diagnostics and from the Workaround Check below, we use it to test the model, not to replace it. We report the conservative figure, and the range.

January

The method, in full. How the figure is built, what's assumed, what's left out.

February

The Index. A national estimate and a per-sector estimate, each with its range. A calculator, so any business can get its own score from nine questions.

After that

The same measurement, repeated, so the number can move.

Nothing in the report names a company. Nothing in it names a person.

Seven minutes, anonymous, for anyone who works in a South African business. We ask about last week: how many hours went to re-entering, matching, chasing, compiling, checking, forwarding, and the spreadsheet you keep because the system doesn't do what you need. One free-text question asks which workaround you'd kill first. That's the answer we read most carefully.

We don't ask your name or your company's. If you'd like your company's estimate when the calculator launches, you can leave an email at the end. It's stored apart from your answers and used once.

One person's week is an anecdote. Ten people's weeks are a pattern. If you'd like your business measured properly, ask ten to fifteen people across finance, sales admin, operations and customer service to take the Check in the same week.

What you get back:

• Your company's own figure, with its range, before the public calculator exists.
• An early copy of the report.
• A short note on which of your workarounds look most expensive, and whether they're the kind a process change fixes or the kind that needs a build.

What we promise:

• Your company is never named. In the report you're "a 120-person distributor" at most.
• Individual answers stay anonymous, including from you.
• Taking part isn't a sales conversation. If you want one, ask.

Because the thing we sell is the fix, and nobody can price a fix for a problem that's never been measured. Most AI case studies start after the build and count what the vendor wants counted. We'd rather start with the number everyone's been living with, published, so the before is on record before any after.

It also keeps us honest. If the Index says a sector's bridging work is small, we'll say so, and we won't be selling there.