Ask a team to describe its process and you will get the process as designed. Ask the same team to describe last Tuesday and you will get something else, the workaround for the system that times out, the manual check that exists because of an incident in 2019, the handover that happens by phone because the form does not have the field.
We call the second thing the operation. It is the only one worth redesigning, and it can only be found by watching.
What six weeks on the floor finds
At a logistics network last year the documented inbound process had eleven steps. Measured at the depot, it had nineteen: three re-keys of the same consignment number, two waits for a supervisor, one walk to a printer at the other end of the building. Two previous efficiency programmes had redesigned the eleven and delivered slides.
19 vs 11
steps in the real inbound process against the documented one
How it was measured
Measured across four depots over six weeks. The eight undocumented steps accounted for 34% of handling time.
Why it has to be measured, not asked
People do not hide the workarounds. They do not see them. A re-key that has happened every day for three years is not a step; it is the job. The only way to find it is to sit beside the work with a stopwatch and a notebook and count.
This is expensive, six weeks of two people, and it is the cheapest part of any operations engagement, because everything designed afterwards is designed against the truth.
What to do with the nineteen
- Redesign with the team leads in the room, not with the process owners. The team leads know why step fourteen exists.
- Test in one depot, one queue or one shift before asking the rest to change. A redesign that survives one site earns the right to the others.
- Publish the weekly run-rate inside the firm for a year. A saving that lives only in a business case is not a saving.