Voice to Action.
Closing the Gap.
What needs to be true before agentic ERP earns its keep — and why most operations skip the work that determines whether the AI investment compounds or evaporates.
Across the operations we measure, average Cycle Time Efficiency is five percent.
That means 95% of any given cycle — from work order open to close, from purchase requisition to receipt, from notification to posting — is non-productive. It's wait. It's exception handling. It's rework. It's the manual touchpoint between two systems that should have spoken to each other directly. It's the planner finding out at seven AM from a phone call.
Five percent. Across operations that have invested heavily in ERP, in process automation, in the SAP stack their boards approved years ago. Five percent.
What changed wasn't the work. It was the choreography. The instrumentation. The team operating as one.
Most asset-intensive operations are running their maintenance loop, their procurement loop, their finance loop, at the equivalent of the 1950s pitstop. This paper is about why — and what to do about it before agentic AI lands on top.
The chain should act as one. It rarely does.
Your maintenance chain has six links. EAM. Planning. Procurement. Scheduling. Execution. Finance. Each one already has AI being deployed against it as we write — agentic copilots, embedded LLMs, predictive models.
The chain itself should act as one. The asset's voice — the condition data, the failure signal, the variance — should travel across all six links to become action. That is what AI-on-every-link looks like in operating reality.
But the chain rarely acts as one. Three things stop it.
Process complexity the agent cannot navigate
Walk a real maintenance planning process inside a typical operator. Count the variants. Count the exceptions. Count the workarounds. Count the manual steps the procedure manual doesn't acknowledge. An agent grounded in a clean, rational process compounds. An agent grounded in folklore reproduces the folklore at machine speed.
Manual work hiding inside every process
The conversation in the muster. The spreadsheet on a planner's desktop nobody else has access to. The phone call to the warehouse to check parts. The handover note written on a hard hat. Across the operators we audit, between 30 and 50 percent of work exists outside the system of record.
Integrations between systems lose context
Most operations have eight to fifteen systems of record involved in a single work order. Every integration is a place where context degrades. Every handoff is a place where the asset's voice loses something between speaker and listener. Multiplied across fifteen seams, the signal arrives downstream as noise.
Orchestration demands shared context.
The principle that holds these three impediments together is simple. Orchestration — agents working in coordination across the chain — requires that the participants share enough context to coordinate.
This is true in multi-agent systems. It is true in distributed computing. It is true in a Formula One pit crew. And it is true in an SAP-heavy asset-intensive operation.
The three impediments are the three places shared context fails:
Process complexity breaks shared context because no one — human or agent — can navigate a process that has more variants than rules. Manual work breaks shared context because the work that hides in spreadsheets and conversations is invisible to every agent and every other function. Disconnected systems break shared context because the signal degrades at every seam.
Three preconditions deliver shared context: Process is the Context, Digital Work Ratio, and Joined-up Systems. The four-metric framework on the next page measures whether your operation has them.
Four metrics. One language.
Impira measures every process on the same four numbers. They are the operating system of how we diagnose readiness for agentic ERP. They cover what AI agents need to ground in — and they tell you, in advance, whether your investment will compound or evaporate.
| Metric | What it measures | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|
DWR Digital Work Ratio |
What % of process work happens on-system | Below 60% indicates a serious workaround culture |
CTS Cost to Serve |
What one transaction truly costs, fully loaded | Above 2× benchmark signals process redesign needed |
CTE Cycle Time Efficiency |
What % of elapsed time is actual work | Below 10% means the process is queuing, not flowing |
FTR First Time Right |
What % of cases complete without rework | Below 75% means quality is being checked too late |
Read together, the four metrics produce eight diagnostic patterns, each with a matched intervention. A process at 38% DWR and 4% CTE does not get the same intervention as one at 80% DWR and 6% CTE. The metrics tell you whether to redesign, automate, simplify, evaluate the workaround, or replace the application.
Read independently, each metric speaks the language of a different executive.
Four metrics. One language. Every level of the organisation reading from the same evidence base.
Four steps. In sequence.
Before you deploy the agent — before the licence runs, before the rollout plan, before the change-management workstream — there are four steps. They are unglamorous. They are also the only path to agents that earn out.
Audit
Use process mining to surface every variant, exception, workaround, and blocker. Stand SAP Signavio Process Insights against your live SAP environment. Run WalkMe Discovery in parallel to map the manual layer the system cannot see. Two to four weeks. You leave with a baseline and a ranked intervention list.
Digitise
Take the manual work the audit surfaced and bring it into the system. WalkMe captures user-side work as guided digital flows. Master-data work brings system-side records under one roof. Together they raise the Digital Work Ratio — the ceiling on what any future agent can do for you.
Streamline
Take the exceptions out before any agent operates inside them. SAP Signavio Process Intelligence drives variant reduction and conformance. S/4HANA Fit-to-Standard turns the simpler design into standard practice. LeanIX manages the systems landscape. The agent grounds in process, not folklore.
Deploy agents
Audit. Digitise. Streamline. Then — and only then — deploy agents. Operators who skip this sequence pay for it twice: once in the rollout, and once in the rework. The sequence determines whether the AI investment compounds or produces confident wrong decisions at machine speed.
The Baseline Sprint. Fixed fee. Fixed scope.
We engage with clients through a fixed-fee, fixed-scope, fixed-timeframe Baseline Sprint. Two to four weeks. Two to three high-value processes. Event log extraction, business-analyst-led enrichment, four-metric calculation, diagnostic pattern classification, and a quantified improvement roadmap.
From event log to $1M+ improvement roadmap — in eight weeks.
The same diagnostic framework we use across every engagement, every industry, every level of the organisation. Calibrated to your processes, your data, your CFO.
What you get
- A baseline of DWR, CTS, CTE, FTR for each in-scope process
- An enriched cost model that includes the manual work the system cannot see
- Diagnostic pattern classification against the eight-pattern matrix
- A prioritised improvement roadmap with quantified opportunity in dollars
- An evidence base your CFO, COO and CIO can read in the same language
What we need from you
- 3–4 days from your executive sponsor and process leads in weeks 1–2
- 2–3 days/week from a business analyst in weeks 3–4 — the heaviest commitment, and the strongest determinant of output quality
- 1 day/week from a process lead in weeks 5–6 for validation
- 2–3 days for the executive readout in weeks 7–8
- We do the rest.
We deploy business process engineers. Not AI tourists.
Impira is a Perth-based firm of business process engineers serving SAP-heavy operations in mining, energy, utilities, financial services and government.
We work with the SAP integrated toolchain — S/4HANA, Signavio, WalkMe, LeanIX, Joule — to discover, simplify, and orchestrate the processes that determine whether an agent earns its keep or fails in production.
Our diagnostic framework — DWR, CTS, CTE, FTR — is the same framework we use across every engagement, every industry, every level of the organisation. The CIO sees which applications have the lowest DWR. The CFO sees which processes carry the highest CTS. The COO sees where CTE drags. Risk sees where FTR fails. All four can drill to the root cause in the same language.
Talk to an engineer.
No pitch decks. No sales calls. A conversation with an engineer about what you need built.
This paper draws on Impira's Portfolio Process Mining framework, our Voice to Action keynote at GRX Forum 2026, and diagnostic data from operator engagements across mining, energy and utilities. The 5% CTE figure is an average across audited processes; the range we observe spans roughly 2% to 18%. Industry-specific benchmarks are available on request.