# Northbridge Services — operating review
Synthetic benchmark document. All people, organizations and figures are fictional.
Document version: 1.0 | Review date: September 16, 2026

## Decision requested
Management must decide whether to authorize a four-week scheduling-system pilot at the East branch. No pilot, purchase or rollout is approved yet. A decision is requested by September 21. The suggested pilot start is September 28, conditional on authorization and completion of access controls. A November rollout is an option discussed by Sales, not a commitment.

## Current operations
East handled 240 service visits in August and West handled 160. East recorded 18 missed arrival windows; West recorded 8. The combined result is 26 missed windows out of 400 visits (6.5%). An early slide rounds the combined rate to 7%; use the underlying counts for precision. No cause has been established. Dispatch staff report that late changes and incomplete customer instructions may contribute, but there has been no causal analysis.

East dispatchers estimated spending 34 staff-hours per week on scheduling during a two-week observation. This is a team total, not time per dispatcher or per visit. West time was not measured. The operations manager hopes the new system could reduce East scheduling effort by 20%; this is a target, not an observed saving. There has been no test of the proposed system.

## Vendor proposal and corrections
The September 10 proposal lists a $900 setup charge and $480 per month for up to 12 named users. On September 14 the vendor clarified that training costs another $300 and is not included in setup. All figures exclude taxes. There is no signed order or agreement, and cancellation terms have not been provided. An older internal note says training is included; the later written vendor clarification supersedes it.

Finance has provisionally reserved $2,000 for a possible pilot. This is a planning allocation, not authority to spend. If management orders setup, one month of service and training at the quoted prices, the pre-tax total would be $1,680. The ongoing monthly cost would be $480 for up to 12 users, assuming unchanged pricing. Additional-user pricing and taxes remain unknown. No annual subscription has been proposed for approval.

## Technical readiness and risks
The vendor says role-based permissions are supported, but IT has not tested the configuration. IT also needs to confirm export formats and deletion procedures. Customer data must not be uploaded before IT authorizes access controls. Using a synthetic dataset for readiness checks is permitted by the project plan and does not authorize a live-data pilot.

An import dry run using synthetic records failed on 7 of 50 records because dates were in mixed formats. A corrected mapping is proposed but has not been retested. This failure rate does not establish production reliability. No customer records were involved in the dry run.

## Owners and next steps
Maya Chen, Operations, will prepare East's staffing and workflow plan by September 18. Luis Ortega, IT, will test permissions and the corrected import mapping by September 19 and report any unresolved conditions. Priya Shah, Finance, will request cancellation terms and additional-user pricing by September 18. Management owns the September 21 go/no-go decision. Nobody has been assigned responsibility for measuring customer satisfaction; its baseline and measurement plan are still missing.

## Success criteria under discussion
The proposed pilot would compare weekly East scheduling hours with the observed 34-hour baseline. Management has suggested a 20% reduction with no increase in missed arrival windows. These criteria are proposed and have not been approved. Staffing, visit volume and task mix must be recorded to interpret any change. West could provide context but cannot be treated as a comparable control without documenting differences. A later review should consider total costs and review effort, not only vendor subscription price.