Map before you build
Most companies can’t say how long an order takes to become an invoice. Fix that first, and the rest gets easy.
BoLondon
Here is a question I ask at the start of almost every conversation: how long does it take your company to go from an order to an invoice?
Most people can’t answer. Not because they don’t care. They care a lot. But nobody has ever measured it. The work is spread across inboxes, spreadsheets, phone calls and the heads of three people who have been there for fifteen years.
And if you can’t say how long something takes, you can’t say whether a change made it better.
Why we start with a map
That is why every job we do starts with a map, not a proposal. Our AI reads how the work is really done, with permission: the emails, the documents, the notes people write. It lays out every step. Who does it, in which system, and how long it takes.
The team adds notes in their own words. “This step only happens for Japan.” “Maria does this on Fridays because the bank is slow.” The map takes all of it in and keeps itself up to date.
It takes days, not months. And there are no workshops with sticky notes on the wall.
What the map shows
The first map of a company is always a surprise, even to the people who run it. Three things come up again and again:
- The hidden steps. A credit check that still runs in an old Excel file. A document that is printed, signed and scanned back in. A price that is copied by hand from one system to another.
- Where the hours go. Measured in minutes, and in money. Not a feeling that “invoicing is slow”, but the number of hours it takes each week.
- What to change first. Every possible change, ranked by the hours it would give back.
Why it makes everything easier
With a map, choosing what to build stops being a debate. Nobody has to win an argument in a meeting. The step that costs the most hours goes first.
And when the change goes live, the same map shows whether it worked. Not in a report someone writes afterwards, but in the steps themselves. The typing step that took forty minutes now takes four.
I have seen companies spend a year building the wrong thing because they never measured the right one. A week spent on a map is the cheapest insurance against that. How we work.
