A realistic view of what automation can address in back-office functions, and what the
pilot actually proves versus the longer-term 20% target.
Back-Office Process Landscape
A typical portfolio company (5,000 employees) has roughly 400-800 people in back-office
functions (Finance, HR, IT, Procurement). That is 8-16% of total headcount. Your target
of 20% reduction in these functions means eliminating 80-160 FTE per company.
| Function | Typical Back-Office FTE (illustrative) | High-Automation Processes | Pilot Coverage |
|---|
| Finance | 120-250 | Invoice processing, expense reconciliation, month-end close, variance reporting, intercompany transfers | 2 processes |
| HR | 80-150 | Onboarding workflows, leave management, compliance tracking, headcount reporting | 1-2 processes |
| IT | 100-200 | Ticket triage, access provisioning, asset management, status reporting | 1 process |
| Procurement | 60-120 | PO processing, vendor onboarding, contract extraction, spend analysis | 1 process |
| Reporting | 40-80 | CFO dashboards, board deck prep, KPI aggregation, LP reports | 1 process |
FTE ranges are illustrative based on infrastructure benchmarks for companies in this size range.
Actual numbers vary significantly. The pilot replaces these with measured baselines per company.
The pilot total per company is 5-8 processes, sequenced to hit the highest-value ones first.
What the Pilot Actually Delivers
Honest assessment
The 5-company pilot automates 5-8 processes per company and saves 4-8 FTE equivalent.
That is roughly 1-2% of back-office headcount, not 20%. But it proves three things:
which processes yield the highest return, what the real savings per process look like,
and whether the approach works in your portfolio companies specifically.
The Path from 1-2% to 20%
Reaching 20% requires systematically working through all back-office process clusters
across each function. Each cluster follows the same discover-build-measure cycle.
Based on pilot results, you can model the full program: how many clusters per company,
what team is needed, and what the realistic timeline looks like. The pilot gives you
the unit economics to make that decision.
| Phase | Scope | Aspirational Reduction |
|---|
| Pilot (Months 1-3) | 5-8 processes per company | 1-2% of back-office FTE |
| Phase 2 (Months 4-9) | 10-15 additional processes per company | 5-8% of back-office FTE |
| Phase 3 (Months 10-18) | 25-40 cumulative processes per company | 12-20% of back-office FTE |
Phase 2 and Phase 3 numbers are aspirational ceilings, not commitments. They depend on
pilot results, change management capacity at each company, and your appetite for the
investment. The pilot replaces these with real unit economics.
Real-Time Visibility as a Byproduct
Once back-office processes run on automated pipelines, the data they generate becomes
available in real time. The same instrumentation that powers automation also produces
live dashboards: month-end variance, headcount, cash, capex, and EBITDA trend at the
portfolio-company level, refreshed nightly instead of quarterly with a 4-6 week lag.
| Today | With Pilot Automation in Place |
|---|
| Quarterly PDFs from each company | Live dashboards updated nightly from source systems |
| 4-6 weeks lag from period close | Same-day visibility on the metrics that matter |
| Inconsistent format across companies | Standard templates with side-by-side comparability |
| Anomalies surface after the next board review | Anomalies surface in the daily report |
This is not a separate workstream. It is what falls out of the pilot automatically once
the data plumbing is in place.
