We judge the pilot against a figure you already report, such as cycle time or exception rate. The time your staff spend checking and correcting the agent counts against the result, which stops an agent that merely moves work around from looking like a success.
What makes a workflow a good candidate, when we advise against a pilot, and the systems it can connect to.
We look for a workflow that takes your staff at least 5 hours a week. Below that, checking the agent's output can eat up everything it saves, and we'd rather tell you before you pay for a pilot than after. Most pilots connect two or three of your systems, often the ERP alongside Checkmk or your SIEM.
Engagement sequence
Pilot, 6 to 10 weeks
Each stage in order with its typical duration, and the point where invoicing starts.
The pilot runs through the first five stages, and we start invoicing when you accept our offer at the end of week two. The durations are what we typically see with two or three connected systems. With more systems, expect the upper end of each range.
What we sign before the discovery call, how long confidentiality lasts, and who can access your records.
We sign an NDA before the discovery call. Where personal data is involved, we sign a data processing agreement at the same time.
Records you mark as confidential stay confidential for three years after you disclose them (GTC section 14).
Only the two engineers on your pilot can access your records.
Understand1 week
Those three months become the baseline we measure the pilot against. Your 20 to 50 past cases become the evaluation set, and we run every change against it, which is how we catch a fix that quietly breaks a case that used to work.
A workflow map and the baseline figure
A lead engineer and an integration engineer. The lead engineer writes your first reply and stays your contact until the review, so you never have to explain the workflow to someone new.
We work remotely, come on site for the mapping sessions, and speak German and English.
Define1 week
Your security team gets the architecture diagram and a written data-flow description first. Then we send the written offer. It sets the target figure, the fixed price, a stop date and the agent's access level in each system. Because the target comes from your own reporting, nobody has to argue at the review about what success meant.
A written offer with the fixed price and the stop date, binding for 30 days.
When you accept the offer in writing, we invoice the first half of the fixed price.
Half when you accept the offer and half after the first review, each due within 10 days
When you accept the offer in writing, we invoice the first half of the fixed price.
Fixed. It covers the build and the evaluation report. A revision round is included if the result misses the agreed test.
We quote Gate inside the project offer, and after the pilot it carries a yearly licence and support fee per deployment. Whether you need it at all depends on where the agent runs and which of your systems it has to reach. The Gate page explains how that works.
Yes. Tell us what you need, and within 2 business days we send a written change note with the new price and stop date for you to accept.
Our GTC let us say that you are a customer, but a signed offer takes precedence over the GTC. If you'd rather stay unnamed, we write that into the offer.
Build2 to 5 weeks
Three or four of your staff do this during the build as part of their normal work. We time their corrections from the first week of testing and send you a weekly note that puts that time next to the figure. You'll see early on whether the agent is saving work or just moving it somewhere else.
An evaluation log for each week of the build
Expect about 40 to 65 hours from your team across the whole pilot, assuming two or three connected systems. Most of it falls on the reviewing staff during the build, and we only need your system administrators in the Approve and deploy week.
Staff time your team supplies during a pilot, by role
About 40 to 65 hours in total, most of it during the build
RoleWhenTime
Process owner From Understand to Review About 5.5 to 7 hours
System specialists Understand 1 hour for each system
Security reviewer Define About 4 hours
Approver Define and Review About 2.5 hours
Reviewing staff (3 or 4) Build About 22 to 42 hours, shared between them
System administrators Approve and deploy 2 hours for each system
Approve and deployUp to 1 week
Because the agent never uses a staff login, you can see exactly what it can reach and revoke it. The administrators we train that week can pause the agent without touching anyone else's account.
A handover pack with these contents:
Under GTC section 8, we keep the intellectual property in the software we build, and you receive a licence to use what was delivered.
The pilot works on copies of your records until Approve and deploy, and the evaluation report and the workflow map are yours to keep either way.
Review2 weeks
At the end of those two weeks we review the result with you. For 30 days after release, the engineers who built the agent handle its incidents. Whoever picks up a problem already knows which cases gave the agent trouble during the build.
An evaluation report, signed off by your approver at the review
How checking time is counted against the time saved, and which figures a pilot can be judged on.
We take the correction time from the build and the two live weeks, subtract it from the time the agent saved, and compare what's left with the baseline from Understand. If the agent saves an hour but needs forty minutes of checking, the report says twenty minutes, because that's what your team really gets back.
After the pilot
If the pilot misses its target, the revision round is already in the price. The revised agent runs for two more weeks on live work before a second review. If that review misses the target too, you can end the pilot there, and the Stop terms apply.
Your team can take the agent over with the handover pack, or we can run it for you under a monthly support agreement with a 30-day notice period.
If the agent runs on Marbell Cloud, the pilot server moves to production without a rebuild or a new contract, and hosting is invoiced monthly.
The revision runs on the same evaluation set as the first review, so the second review compares like with like and the revised agent can't pass on easier cases.
We return your sample records and delete our copies within 30 days.
You keep the evaluation report and the workflow map.
Your team removes the agent's identities, and we shut down anything running on Marbell Cloud.
Outcomes of the pilot review and what each means for you
Response times, support hours, how updates are tested, and the notice period.
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After the review
Systems the pilot already connected need nothing more from your administrators, and another team can reuse the connections to the systems both teams share. That's why a second workflow usually starts faster than the first.
The reply comes from the lead engineer who would run your pilot, with a proposed time for a first call and any questions about your systems that we need answered before it.