Your customers are waiting somewhere in your process. Do you know where?

Pick your last ten orders and draw the journey. Enquiry, quotation, confirmation, production or purchase, dispatch, bill, payment.

Now mark how long each step took. Not how long the work took. How long the thing sat there before anybody touched it.

Those two numbers are very different, and the gap between them is your customer's experience.

The waiting is invisible from inside

Everyone inside the business is busy, so it feels like everything is moving. But work does not usually get stuck while somebody is doing it. It gets stuck in the handover, when it has left one person and not yet reached the next.

The quotation that was ready on Monday and went out on Thursday because it needed your figure. The order confirmed on the phone that reached production two days later. The bill that waited for a signature.

In each case the actual work took an hour. The customer waited three days. And the person responsible for the delay does not know he was, because from where he sits he dealt with it as soon as he saw it.

Why this is worth fixing before anything else

Because it costs nothing to fix and it is what the customer actually judges you on.

He does not know how good your production is. He has not seen your workshop. What he experiences is how long things take and whether he had to chase. Those are the only two things he can measure, so those are the two things he uses to decide whether you are good.

Shortening a wait is usually a matter of someone seeing that something is waiting.

Take your last ten orders. At which single step did work sit longest without anybody touching it?

Finding the step where work sits is the first thing we look at in any business. Send us your process and we will mark the waiting for you.