Nobody in the company was doing anything wrong. That is precisely why the waste had survived eleven years.
The Challenge
Atlas had grown from 40 to 260 staff without ever re-examining how work moved between departments. Every process made sense when it was designed. Very few of them made sense next to each other.
The visible symptom was order-to-dispatch time: quoted at eight days, actually averaging nineteen. The invisible symptom was that three departments each maintained their own copy of the customer list.
How we mapped it
We shadowed real work rather than reading process documents. Over three weeks we followed twelve actual orders end to end, recording every handoff, every wait and every time somebody re-typed information that already existed somewhere.
The result was uncomfortable and useful: of the 61 steps in the order process, 23 added no information and no verification. They existed because a person who had left in 2019 once needed a signature.
What We Did
We redesigned nine core workflows around a simple rule: every step must either add information, verify information, or move physical goods. Anything else was removed or automated.
The three customer lists became one, with clear ownership assigned to a named role rather than a department. That single change removed most of the re-typing and, with it, most of the data errors that had been generating credit notes.
We deliberately did not recommend new software in the first six months. Eight of the nine workflows improved with the systems already in place, and buying a platform to automate a broken process is the most expensive mistake in this field.
The roadmap
- Months 1–3 — remove the 23 non-value steps, consolidate the customer list. No spend required.
- Months 4–6 — redesign the quoting workflow, introduce shared status visibility across departments.
- Months 7–9 — automate the two workflows that genuinely needed tooling, with a defined selection process.
- Months 10–12 — measure, retrain, and hand ownership fully to the internal operations lead.
The Outcome
Running cost across the nine workflows fell 27% within the first year. Order-to-dispatch dropped from nineteen days to thirteen, and the quoted figure was revised to a number the company could actually meet.
Credit notes issued for data errors fell by roughly two thirds — a saving nobody had asked us to look for, because nobody had connected it to the duplicated customer lists.
We asked for a software recommendation. They told us not to buy anything for six months. It was the most honest advice we have paid for.
Marc Dubois — Managing Director, Atlas Manufacturing
What we would do differently
Shadowing twelve orders was enough to find the pattern but thin for the seasonal variation in this industry. On a comparable engagement we would spread observation across two quarters, even if that lengthens the audit.
Curious what an audit would find in your operation?
