Strategic Systems Architecture
The value your company loses between one function and the next.
Every department does its job well, yet margins get thinner and customers wait longer for answers. It happens in the handovers, where a decision crosses several functions without anyone owning the whole of its path, and that is exactly where we find the value being lost so that we can design how to stop losing it.
Write to us“I know what I should be doing. I don't know why it isn't happening.”
These frictions do not show up in reports, whether internal or written by outside consultants, because those writing from inside, however well-intentioned, see the problem from the standpoint of their own function, while those coming from outside usually examine one area at a time, which seen on its own does its job. The frictions therefore show up only in their effects, such as margins falling with no clear cause or the same conflicts recurring between the same departments.
That is why we work on how decisions are structured before we look at tools, meaning the real structure, which rarely matches the organisation chart because it depends on who actually carries weight and who avoids contradicting whom. Often the problem is the structure, but sometimes it is the structure itself that has put a person in a role that does not suit them.
Who we work with
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Family-owned manufacturers
Mid-sized manufacturers with several functions and an ERP system in use, where the processes that cross departments have become complex, such as quoting for orders or planning between sales and production. The moment often comes with a generational handover or when growth has outrun the organisation.
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Buy-and-build platforms
Groups built through successive acquisitions, often with a fund among the shareholders, for example platforms bringing together professional practices or industrial groups that acquire businesses along the same supply chain. Since each acquired business brings its own processes and procedures, the platform has to make them work as a single organisation. We bring order by defining common processes and procedures and building them together with the people who will have to use them. As ours is organisational work, we charge for it as such: we do not take a stake in the business, and our fees do not depend on acquisitions being completed.
We start from one process
Friction Report
Starting from a process that crosses several functions and that you already have doubts about, in about four weeks you receive a written map of where it creates friction and loses value, with measurable evidence drawn from data the company already holds.
Alongside the data, we interview the people involved at every level to understand how they experience the process, because accounts that do not match are data in themselves: they show where information stops and where people and roles do not fit.
We ask your people for about ten hours in total, and confidentiality is signed before we see any data. The document is yours even if you decide not to go further, because it is written so that you can act on your own.
After the Friction Report
The Friction Report, however, is only the first step of a longer path. When the friction found in one process reaches into the rest of the organisation, the operating review extends to the whole company and produces a written account of how it works as a whole, meaning who decides what and what those decisions cost in time and money.
If you decide to act, we design the change with the people who will have to make it work, setting out who decides, with what information and at which step; where it pays, the design includes AI tools built for specific tasks.
You can entrust implementation to whoever you prefer, but if you wish it is carried out by a permanent partner we work with, a company separate from Cogniquity. In that case we stay with it to the end, so you have a single point of contact from the diagnosis to the result.
How we work
We work in confidence, starting with the interviews, because that assurance is what allows people to say how things really are, which an internal review rarely achieves. Every figure in what we write can be traced back to its source, so that you and your advisers can check it. We use AI to make our analysis faster and more accurate, but it remains a tool that serves the method, and decisions stay with those who have to take them.
Behind Cogniquity
Cogniquity was founded in 2025 and is registered in England and Wales. It is based in London, from where it works with companies across Europe.
The founders bring more than forty years of work across different industries and five start-up exits. Their experience includes pilot projects for ESTEC, the European Space Agency's technical centre in the Netherlands, as well as the music industry and the move of cinema to digital, while in the motor industry it runs through Nissan, FCA (now Stellantis) and Hyundai, including work with dealers, many of them family-owned groups. It also covers telecoms at Vodafone Italia and institutional representation with Confindustria, the Italian employers' federation.
We have delivered Friction Reports to companies in six sectors and, for one of the Big Four, designed the architecture of a regulatory reporting platform for a major bank.
Write to us
Tell us about the company and the process that concerns you. If you are an adviser or a fund writing on behalf of a client, there is no need to name it in your first message.
You can also write to hello@cogniquity.com