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You can audit a company for repeated work in one afternoon if you keep the scope to one bounded workflow. Map what really happens from a clear trigger to a clear outcome, ask the people doing the work where tasks are repeated or delayed, and leave with one issue to validate or test. This is a focused diagnosis—not a complete audit of the company or a promise of a particular savings percentage.
Choose one workflow with a clear beginning and end
Pick a recurring process with a recognizable trigger, a defined outcome, enough volume to matter, and a known pain point. Examples include client onboarding, proposal creation, invoicing, customer returns, inventory stocking, customer inquiries, booking management, and appointment scheduling. Trying to map the whole company in one sitting makes it harder to finish and harder to see constraints. The National AI Centre’s process-mapping guidance recommends starting with a process that is repeated and causing problems.
Before the session, write down the trigger and what counts as done. For example: “A signed client agreement arrives” could start an onboarding workflow; “the client is ready to begin service” could define its end. If participants disagree about those boundaries, resolve that before mapping steps.
Bring in the people who do the work
Invite the owners of the steps and the people responsible for important handoffs. A manager or procedure document may describe the intended process, but the workers can reveal workarounds, manual fixes, and exceptions that happen in practice. Ask participants to describe what they actually do, not what the process is supposed to be. The University of California, Berkeley’s BPMO documentation guidance recommends interviewing workers and validating the current-state map with them.
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Use paper, a whiteboard, sticky notes, or a digital diagramming tool. No special physical equipment is required; the Business.govt.nz process-mapping guide notes that a process can be mapped on paper or with sticky notes.
Map the current process, not the ideal one
Walk through the workflow in sequence. For each step, record the action, the role responsible, the input it needs, the output it produces, and where that output goes next. Show handoffs and decision branches, including the normal path and common failure paths. Keep the map detailed enough to expose the issue, but not so granular that the team spends the afternoon documenting trivial motions.
- Trigger and finish: What starts the workflow, and what outcome means it is complete?
- Step and owner: What happens, and who performs or approves it?
- Input and output: What information or item is needed, and what is produced?
- Handoff or decision: Where does the work go next? What changes the route?
- Time: How much active work does the step take, and how long does it wait before or after?
- Volume and quality: How often does the process run, and how often is the result accepted without correction?
Distinguish active process time from elapsed lead time. Process time is time spent actively working; lead time includes waiting, such as time in a queue or awaiting information. A large gap between the two can point to a delay even when the task itself is quick. AWS explains these measures in its software-development example, Creating a development value stream map; use the concepts carefully outside software work.
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Mark repeated work and delays as you go
Tag the points where work is repeated, corrected, delayed, or done inconsistently. Repeated work is broader than performing an identical task twice: it can include entering the same information in multiple places, chasing missing details, returning an item for correction, or processing more than the outcome requires.
- Rework: A step must be corrected, returned, or done again.
- Duplicate entry: The same information is manually entered in more than one place.
- Waiting: Work pauses for a decision, approval, queue, or missing input.
- Missing information: A downstream person has to request details that could have been available earlier.
- Inconsistent execution: Different people handle the same case in different ways, creating errors or extra checks.
- Over-processing: A task takes effort that does not improve the needed result.
Ask the team: “What do you do when this process starts?” “What workarounds have you developed?” “Where do things usually get stuck or delayed?” “What information do you wish you had at each step?” and “What would make your job easier here?” These are discussion prompts from the National AI Centre, not survey findings.
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Choose which issue to investigate first
Compare candidate issues using evidence the team can reasonably estimate during the session. These dimensions synthesize guidance from the National AI Centre, NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and AWS; they are practical questions, not a validated numerical scoring system.
| Dimension | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Recurrence or volume | How often does this happen, and how many cases are affected? |
| Customer impact | Does it affect delivery, accuracy, or the customer experience? |
| Time | How much time is active work, and how much is waiting or queue time? |
| Quality and rework | How often is the step corrected, returned, or repeated? |
| Feasibility | Can the process owners test a small change, and is success plausible? |
NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership describes value stream mapping as a way to “visualize your manufacturing process and information flows” and names customer impact, lead-time or inventory reduction, probability of success, and volume among prioritization considerations. Its Value Stream Mapping page was updated on 22 May 2024. For a cross-industry office workflow, the same dimensions can guide discussion, but do not treat them as a universal formula.
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Use estimates to decide what deserves validation or a small test. Do not report estimated hours as measured savings. No general published statistic establishes how much time a company saves by conducting a one-afternoon audit. The National AI Centre gives one illustrative accounting-business example—“Total time per client: 5 to 7 hours over 2 weeks”—for an onboarding workflow; it is an example, not a population benchmark.
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Before ending the session, capture the current-state map, the highest-priority repeat-work issues, who will validate the leading issue, and one small next action. If the team proposes a change, define what it should improve—such as fewer corrections, less waiting, or fewer duplicate entries—and check that measure after the change. Bring the map back to the people who own the affected steps, confirm that it reflects actual practice, and update it when the process changes. AWS’s guidance recommends reassessing and updating a value stream map after changes.
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