Bottleneck Buster
Day 3 – Design a Better Solution
Focus on the bottleneck
Review the results of the time measurement exercise. Focus in the areas where most of the time is being spent. This is where we’ll focus for the remainder of the course.
Mapping Exercise
Now that you know where to focus, we are going to map out the steps of the process from start to finish. Write them down in order along with how long each step in the process takes on average.
Circle the most time consuming step in the process. This is where we’ll focus our efforts to design a better solution which will eliminate this as the bottleneck.
Example
My fictitious firm Philly Phanatics offers bookkeeping services. We close the books for each of our clients at the end of every month. Turns out this is where our bottleneck lies. Specifically in getting the data from the client and reconciling all of the transactions.
Today this process works by receiving client bank statements via email and having our team add them to a spreadsheet before reconciling them.
We’ll map out the steps from getting the data from the client to successfully reconciling all of the records. We’ll also write down how long each step in the process takes.
Next Steps
Tomorrow I’m going to walk you through how we’ll use these results to map out the steps towards building a better solution to eliminate this bottleneck.
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