Afanasyevs builds the operating layer: the level between the systems a company runs on and the decisions it has to make — a working model of how the company actually operates, on top of the tools it already owns.
A group operating system for a seven-entity minerals trading group. The case →
The shadow loop
It is the absence of structured, reliable company knowledge.
Knowledge is fragmented across people, documents, channels, tickets, databases and operational systems. Humans compensate with memory and experience; agents cannot. So the written process becomes a fiction — and the real one lives in a shadow loop. Every automation built on a fictional process fails on contact with the real one.
What this is
Context, rules, evidence, permissions, procedures — captured from how the company actually operates, structured, and held in one governed place. It records how decisions were made: the case, the evidence, the reasoning, what followed. From that record, the work that can be automated safely is handed to agents under explicit rules.
The goal is not to replace institutional knowledge — it is to turn it into an executable system.
How it is built
The model is drawn from interviews and shadowing, then maintained by the operations running through it — so it reflects the process in use, not the one described once.
What the system cannot close is routed to a named human with a deadline. The decision is recorded with its reasoning; recurring ones are engineered back into the automation, so coverage grows where the system was weakest.
The rule for moving work to an agent: its outcome must be verifiable, its actions reversible or contained, and its precedent sufficient. Deterministic where a rule will do; agents only where they earn their place.
Two numbers to hold an engagement to: the share of cases closing without a human, and whether repeat exceptions are falling. Agreed at the start, reported as the build runs.
The engagement
The operating model as it actually is: process maps, an entity-relationship diagram, workshopped with your team.
Scope, logic and gates approved on paper. Fixed fee — no meter running.
The operating layer, the synchronisation, the interfaces, the migration of history.
Only where a written business case justifies it — and only inside your access-control perimeter.
The system is handed over with logic your team can edit and a backlog your team feeds itself.
Selected work
“This is our new personalised ERP.” — the group’s owner
An industrial minerals group across seven entities in Southeast Asia, Oceania and the EU. Seven ledgers synchronised in real time, one operating layer above them. Group sales analysis that matched the team’s own hand-built benchmark — then surfaced transactions the benchmark had missed. Six months, fixed fee.
Read the case Writing from the practice →Are we a fit?
Most groups recognise three or four of these, rarely all of them. If several describe the company you run, the conversation is likely to be a useful one.
If some of this is your shape, the diagnostic will show where an operating layer pays for itself first — and where it wouldn’t.
The principal
Afanasyevs is the practice of Alexander Afanasyev. Clients get C-level judgement in the room from the first call — without the overhead of a team, and without weeks of discovery after which the senior consultant hands the work to someone else. EU and Southeast Asia.
Cover
Underwritten by Markel Insurance SE, Munich; brokered by exali AG. Verify the cover at exali →
One 45-minute call: where your group stands, what can safely move to agents, and what a first engagement would look like.
Start with a diagnostic