Asking an expert to explain their judgment does not work. They have compressed twenty years into instinct, so they narrate the steps and skip the reasoning. Getting the reasoning out takes a protocol, and it takes being in the building.
We use Applied Cognitive Task Analysis. It is an established elicitation method, not something we invented for a sales deck.
Each stage narrows the target. By the last one you are asking about specific decisions in specific situations, which is the only level at which expertise can actually be described.
Map the macro-structure of the work with the specialist. What are the major stages, and which two or three of them actually require judgment rather than execution? Most of the job is procedural. We are locating the parts that are not, so the expensive interview time goes where the knowledge is.
For each of those difficult parts, probe what makes it difficult. Where does a newcomer reliably get it wrong? What does the specialist notice that others miss? What has changed in twenty years about how they approach it? This surfaces the shape of the expertise before we go after the detail.
Walk the specialist through real incidents and constructed scenarios, stopping at each decision point. What did you see. What did you think it meant. What did you do. What would a less experienced person have done here. Reasoning surfaces in context that never surfaces in the abstract.
Synthesise all of it into a structured artifact: the cues, the strategies, the errors, and why each one matters. This is the thing that gets tagged, indexed, and becomes the vault. It is the difference between saying we interviewed someone and holding a defensible model of how that person decides.
The specialist has to want to take part. The method works with someone engaged and does not work with someone counting down. That is worth establishing before anything is signed.
Half of what we are after only appears when the specialist can point at it. The panel that reads wrong. The bay where the sequence changes. The noise the line makes before it stops. On a video call, that material stays invisible because nobody thinks to mention it.
Sessions run with the specialist in their own environment, interleaved with observation of the work itself. We write up between sessions rather than after everything, so what we hand back is checkable while the person is still there to correct it.
Some of the work is remote. Structuring, tagging, drafting, and gap analysis do not need us on your floor, and it is cheaper for you if they happen off site.
Nothing is held back for a reveal at the end. The vault is delivered in increments, so you can judge quality early and stop if it is not landing.
Comes out of the first conversation. Names the specialists, the systems, the body of knowledge in scope, what is explicitly out, and the estimate. You keep it whether or not you engage us.
Delivered within two weeks of the first call.
Structured entries land as they are written and validated, not at the end. Each drop is reviewable by the specialist while their memory of the session is fresh, which is when corrections are cheap.
The complete vault as a file tree, plus an honest account of what we did not get to, where coverage is thin, and what a second phase would target. The gap report matters as much as the vault.
You buy hours of skilled elicitation and the structured output of those hours, at $150 per hour. There are no seats, no licences, and no recurring fee that has to keep being paid for you to open your own files.
Engagements start at a 40 hour minimum. We scope an estimate up front and bill against actuals. If the work runs shorter, you pay less. If the scope grows because the specialist knows more than anyone expected, which happens, we tell you before it costs you rather than after.
Every engagement runs under a master services agreement with a statement of work per scope. Mutual non-disclosure comes first, before the scoping conversation gets specific, because it usually needs to.
Some organizations meet us during a system implementation rather than a retirement. The knowledge problem is the same one, arriving from the other direction.
We place practitioners who have run plant and warehouse operations, not only projects, onto warehouse management, execution, planning, and enterprise system deployments. Brand agnostic. They are fluent enough in the operation to challenge a vendor assumption before it becomes a live problem.
This one ends with a foundation. Decisions, process logic, configuration rationale, and exceptions get written down as the work happens, in the same structured, machine-readable form as a capture engagement, rather than reconstructed from memory in a rushed closeout.
To be clear about scope: an implementation engagement produces the documentation, not a finished vault. It lays the groundwork, and it means a later capture engagement does not start from nothing. Both are scoped and priced separately.
Recordings, transcripts, and your documents are reachable only by the practitioners working your scope. Encrypted in transit and at rest. Named individuals, not a general pool.
Your material is not used to train, fine-tune, or improve any model or product offered to another client or to the public. Where tooling assists the structuring work, it operates on your corpus alone.
At the end of the engagement you get everything back. Source material is returned or destroyed to your instruction, and we certify the destruction in writing if you ask. Where a pilot does not convert, deletion happens within 30 days.
Applied Continuity LLC is not itself SOC 2 certified. Where we use third-party infrastructure, those providers hold their own certifications and we can share the relevant sub-processor documentation for procurement review.
Forty-five minutes. We map who is leaving, what they carry, and what a first scope would cover. You keep the scope document either way.
Mutual non-disclosure before anything specific gets discussed.