ApexIQ Companion | Quality Audits
What a report looks like
An excerpt of a document audit report on a technical solution. The seller, its customer, and the document are fictional, so every finding can be shown as it was written.
Fictional companies and documentNo customer material usedAn excerpt of the full report
What was sent
A technical solution, a week before it goes to the customer
Halden Systems sells shipment exception detection to logistics operators. Its solutions team wrote an 18-page technical solution for Marlowe Freight, which is choosing 2 vendors for a shortlist, and sent it for audit with a short brief.
- Readers: Marlowe Freight's head of enterprise architecture, and the operations director who owns dispatch
- Purpose: a place on the 2-vendor shortlist
- Proof declared in the brief: an availability schedule in Halden's services agreement, and 2 reference deployments named under a non-disclosure agreement
The report
The excerpt, as it is delivered
The report is set in the white sheets. Our notes on why it is written the way it is sit between them, on the orange rule, and are not part of what you receive.
Quality Audits | Document audit report
Technical solution: real-time shipment exception detection for Marlowe Freight
1. Executive brief
The document is at its strongest in Section 5, where the integration design traces a shipment event from the telematics feed to the dispatcher's alert and names the component that handles it at each step. An architect at Marlowe Freight can follow the flow without a meeting.
It scores 58 / 100, in the Weak band, with a blocking issue present: the sizing table in Section 6 still carries placeholder text, and the capacity figure the price rests on depends on it. The primary problem is that the performance claims carry no test conditions, so neither of the document's 2 readers can check them.
Before this goes to Marlowe Freight, replace the placeholder with the peak event rate Marlowe gave in discovery, and give each performance claim the volume, the percentile, and the environment it was measured in.
2. Overall verdict
| Category | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Score | 58 / 100 |
| Band | Weak |
| Blocking issues | Blocking issue present: unfilled placeholder text in the sizing table |
| Verdict | Do not send until the sizing table is complete and every performance claim states the conditions it was measured under. |
| Intended audience | Marlowe Freight's head of enterprise architecture, and the operations director who owns dispatch |
| Intended purpose | A place on the 2-vendor shortlist for the exception detection programme |
A blocking issue overrides the band. Where one is present, the band still reports what the document scored, and the verdict names the issue.
3. Scorecard
3 of the areas assessed. The scorecard you receive gives every area its score and the reason for it. This example shows the overall score only.
| Area | Why this score |
|---|---|
| Audience fit | Sections 5 and 6 are written for the architect and serve that reader well. The operations director, who decides alongside, meets no dispatch outcome until page 14, so half of the stated audience has to hunt for the reason to shortlist. |
| Evidence standard | The 1 customer reference is sourced and caveated. The 3 headline performance claims carry no volume, percentile, or test environment, and the availability figure is stated without the schedule that commits Halden to it. |
| Constraints and dependencies | The design depends on a push interface from Marlowe's telematics provider that nothing in the document confirms exists. Data residency is raised in Section 1 and not carried into the architecture. |
4. Blocking issues
A single blocking issue means the document must not be sent until it is resolved, whatever it scored.
| Blocking issue | What was found, and what must change |
|---|---|
| Unfilled placeholder text | Section 6, the sizing table, reads "[TBC: peak events per second]" in the row the capacity recommendation is calculated from. A reader at Marlowe Freight sees an unfinished document and cannot check the capacity figure. Enter the peak rate from the discovery notes, recalculate the recommendation, and search the file for an opening square bracket before sending. |
5. Critical issues
3 of the 5 critical issues in the report.
Issue 1. REDThe performance claims cannot be tested
Section 3 states that the platform "processes shipment events in real time at any scale" and "raises exceptions in under a second". Neither names the event volume, the percentile, or the environment the figure came from, so Marlowe's architect has nothing to hold the design to, and a competitor who states its conditions will look more credible for claiming less. Replace both with the measured figures and their conditions, for example the 95th percentile latency at a stated rate of events per second in a named test environment, or remove the claims.
Issue 2. REDThe integration rests on an interface nobody has confirmed
Section 5 shows the telematics provider pushing each event to the ingestion service, and every step after it depends on that push. The document does not say whether Marlowe's provider offers one, and the Customer Needs Discovery in Appendix A records the feed as a nightly file export. If the architect finds the gap first, the whole design reads as untested. Name the interface the provider actually offers, record it as a dependency with an owner at Marlowe Freight, and show the design for a batch feed as the fallback.
Issue 3. AMBER1 deployment option is presented as the only one
Section 4 proposes the vendor-hosted service and compares it with nothing. Section 1 records that Marlowe Freight requires shipment data to stay in the UK, and the hosting region is not named, so the architect will raise the question the document should have answered. Add a short options table comparing the hosted service in a named UK region with deployment in Marlowe's own cloud account, on residency, time to the first alert, and running cost, and state which one Halden recommends and why.
6. Claim and evidence audit
Every material quantitative claim, superlative, and external citation, logged for verification.
| Claim | Location | Source status | Action required |
|---|---|---|---|
| "99.95% monthly availability" | Section 2 | Unsupported on the page. The brief declares an availability schedule in the services agreement. | Source it: cite the schedule and its version beside the figure. |
| "Reduces missed exceptions by 60%" | Section 1 | Unsupported. No evidence declared in the brief. | Down-scope it to what the 2 reference deployments measured, or remove it. |
| "Live with 2 regional hauliers since 2025" | Section 7 | Caveated: named under a non-disclosure agreement, with a reference call offered. | None. |
Sections 7 to 9 are not shown in this example: language and style, the section-by-section assessment, and missing evidence, assumptions, and risks.
10. Revised structure
The reordering puts the operations director's outcome first and answers the architect's 2 open questions before they are asked.
| # | Current | Recommended, point-first | What changes and why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | Dispatchers see exceptions while there is still time to act | Opens on the outcome the operations director is buying, which the document first reaches on page 14. |
| 2 | Platform overview | The design fits Marlowe Freight's telematics feed as it runs today | Brings the integration design forward and settles the interface question before the architect raises it. |
| 3 | New section: not currently present | Shipment data stays in the UK | Answers the residency requirement from Section 1, with the hosting options compared. |
11. Recommended priority actions
Immediate: fix before sending
- Section 6: replace the placeholder with the peak event rate from discovery, and recalculate the capacity recommendation.
- Section 3: give each performance claim its volume, percentile, and test environment, or remove it.
Short-term: fix in the next revision
- Section 5: confirm the interface Marlowe's telematics provider offers, and add the batch fallback design.
- Section 4: add the options comparison, and name the UK hosting region.
Medium-term: structural or recurring improvements
- Across the document, the headings name topics. Rewrite each as the conclusion of its section, so the operations director can read the argument from the headings alone.
The full report
What this excerpt leaves out
The report you receive carries every section, for your artefact and your readers:
- The score and the reason for every area assessed
- Every critical issue, ordered by impact
- Language and style, with the current text and the rewrite
- A finding and an action for every section of the artefact
- Missing evidence, unstated assumptions, and the risks of sending it as it stands
Your artefact is deleted when the report is sent, and nothing you send is ever used as an example. This one was written from scratch.
Price
£1,050 standard, £1,250 same day
Flat price per artefact, excluding VAT. The same-day rules are on the pricing page.