Where the Flow Stops · Chapter Two

One Order, One Desk, One Week

An order that holds fifty minutes of work waits six days, and the waiting is where the cost lives.

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Two of Where the Flow Stops: Finding the Gain an Organisation Already Holds.

Abstract

An order that holds fifty minutes of work waits six days, and the waiting is where the cost lives. 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.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989200

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). One Order, One Desk, One Week. In Where the Flow Stops. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989200

@incollection{santaanna2026where2,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {One Order, One Desk, One Week},
  booktitle = {Where the Flow Stops},
  chapter   = {2},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989200},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/where-the-flow-stops/02-one-order-one-desk-one-week/}
}

References

  1. Kingman, J. F. C. (1961). The single server queue in heavy traffic. Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 57(4), 902–904. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305004100036094
  2. Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The principles of product development flow: Second generation lean product development. Celeritas Publishing.
  3. KC, D. S., & Terwiesch, C. (2009). Impact of workload on service time and patient safety: An econometric analysis of hospital operations. Management Science, 55(9), 1486–1498. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1090.1037

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  1. Chapter OneThe Meeting After the Meetingdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989198
  2. Chapter TwoOne Order, One Desk, One Weekdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989200
  3. Chapter ThreeThe Question Nobody Asksdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989202
  4. Chapter FourThe Person Who Already Knowsdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989206
  5. Chapter FiveA Number Both Sides Can Signdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989209
  6. Chapter SixThe First Ninety Daysdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989211
  7. Chapter SevenThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989213

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Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.