Tomas Reid · Head of Strategy
Ask five people how an order moves through your business and you’ll hear five different stories. Until those stories become one map, every fix is a guess.
Mapping sounds bureaucratic, but the version we run takes ninety minutes and fits on one page. The team stands around it, argues about it, corrects it — and by the end, the bottleneck is usually pointing at itself.
The ninety-minute map
1. Follow one real job. Pick yesterday’s trickiest order and trace exactly what happened to it — who touched it, what tool they used, where it waited. Real beats typical every time.
2. Mark every wait. Draw waiting time in a different colour. Teams are always shocked: the coloured stretches dwarf the working ones, and the fix becomes obvious.
3. Name one owner per stretch. Any step with two owners has none. Assigning a single name to each stretch resolves half of all “communication problems” on the spot.
Then fix in order
Work the map left to right, biggest wait first. Resist the urge to buy software before the map is clean — automation pasted over confusion just produces faster confusion. One page, one team, one afternoon: that’s the cheapest consulting you’ll ever do.
