Ten to nine, the order sheet
It is ten to nine on a Monday, and the order has been in the building for six days. The customer is a hospital, and the part is a motor assembly for the dishwasher in its main kitchen, which has been washing trays by hand since the previous Monday. At nine o'clock the hospital's facilities manager will ring, as she has rung every morning since Wednesday, and the order coordinator who takes the call has the order sheet on the desk in front of her under the strip light. It is a printed page with a column of initials and dates down the right-hand side, one for every desk the order has visited. There are seven sets of initials. Her shoulders have been up near her ears since Friday afternoon.
She is a composite, drawn from the way an order is described when operations researchers follow one through a firm, and no firm is meant. What she is about to discover is not.
Before the phone rings she does something she has not done before. She adds up the time anybody actually spent on the order. Twelve minutes to enter it. Six to run the customer's credit. Fifteen for an engineer to confirm that the assembly fits that model of machine. Eight for stores to find it. Ten to pack it and book the courier. The total is a little under an hour, and the order has been in the building for six days. Almost everything that has happened to it since Tuesday afternoon is waiting.
Ammanuel Santa Anna's canon on mapping the flow of value through an organisation has a sentence for the column of initials on her sheet. "Every handoff between departments is simultaneously a material exchange and a relational event." The order moved seven times. Each move was a piece of paper, and each was also a small negotiation between two desks about whose problem it now was.
This issue makes one claim. In most organisations the largest share of the time between a request and its delivery is spent in queues between people, not in the work itself; the queues are invisible because every desk they sit beside is busy; and the time lost there is a gain the firm already holds, in its lead time, its working capital and its customers' patience, waiting to be collected.
The rest of this article, its sources and its practice are kept in Where the Flow Stops, Chapter 2, in the colour art edition.
