Order-to-delivery
- Evidence: clear, mapped, measured
- Team: ready and asking for it
- Payback: fast, and it funds the next move
87%
of the first stream’s hours would add no value: waiting, chasing, redoing
Case study · A representative engagement
The number won’t move. Nobody has time to find out why.
You own this company. Mid-hold. Great brand, capable team, and a margin that will not budge. This is what would happen if you brought us in, told in pictures.
Illustrative composite: the company and numbers are representative. The method is exactly how we work.
+34%
throughput within 90 days
30 days
to the first signal the number would move
Honest by designRepresentative engagement. Real method, illustrative company (a mid-market consumer-goods distributor) and numbers. No client is depicted.
The unease
You can feel the drag. You can’t point at it.
The company, an illustrative consumer-goods distributor, sells more every quarter. The margin does not follow. The gap between those two lines is where your best people are drowning.
Decisions reopen. The same question returns to the same three people.
Work comes back. Context dies in every handoff, so it gets done twice.
Heroics are the process. The best people rescue the flow by hand. Again.
The two lines that don’t agree
Growth keeps buying more work. The work keeps eating the margin.
The call
One conversation. One place to start.
Ninety minutes of listening. Six workflows on the table, and one to start: the one where the drag is loudest.
Marketing ops
Customer service
Order-to-delivery
Wholesale motion
Finance close
Product dev
Small enough to finish. Real enough to matter.
Act one · See
Two weeks inside the actual work.
A Bottega workshop would map two core workflows end to end, sitting with the people who carry them: order by order, handoff by handoff.
What the map would show
87% of the work would not be the work.
87%
Non-value-add: hours no customer would ever pay for. The most capable people in the building would be the most buried in them.
Measured in the room, not from a dashboard. Two weeks sitting with the people who carry the orders: timing real work with a stopwatch, writing down every wait, every chase, every bounce.
One order, door to door
How the 87% is measured: every elapsed hour goes into one of two buckets. Teal is real work, the kind a customer would pay for. Coral is waiting, chasing, and redoing. Twenty-seven of the thirty-one hours are coral.
Waiting on handoffs
24%
Rework and corrections
21%
Re-keying between systems
17%
Chasing status
15%
Approvals that change nothing
10%
The work that matters
13%
Not a people problem. A process that grew faster than anyone had time to redesign, illustrated with representative proportions.
The hard call
We’d find two problems. We’d fix one, and tell you why.
The workshop would surface two bleeds
Wholesale sales motion
- Tangled into three other systems
- Mid-migration, owned by nobody
- Slow, uncertain payback at high cost
Real money leaking. Still the wrong first move.
Honest, even when it costs us the bigger invoice.
Telling you not to fix the wholesale motion yet would be the most valuable call of the engagement. We’d make it every time.
Act two · Shape
Research shows that workflow redesign, not the model, is what makes AI pay off.
Bolt AI onto a tangled flow and you get a faster tangle. We redesign the flow first, so the tools have something worth speeding up.
Where AI value actually comes from
Paraphrased: McKinsey’s State of AI tested 25 factors; redesigning workflows around AI was the single biggest predictor of bottom-line impact. BCG’s 10-20-70 rule corroborates.
Redesign the flow, then add AI.
Before · the flow we’d find
11 steps · 6 pure waste · every coral box is where the margin goes
After · the flow we’d shape
5 steps · 0 re-keys · 1 decision · AI only where it pays, people on the judgment
Each improvement funds the next.
Move 1
Order-to-delivery
The loudest drag, fixed first.
OKR: cycle time, cut in half→funds
Move 2
Inventory sync
Paid for by move one’s recovered hours.
OKR: stockout rate, floor it→funds
Move 3
Returns loop
By now the program pays for itself.
OKR: refund cycle, days not weeksNo leap of faith. Each move pays for the next, and each has one number everyone can watch move.
The result
31 hours would become about 11. The margin would finally move.
Same workflow we’d map in act one, measured the same way: door to door, order by order. Here is what would change, and where the money shows up.
One order, door to door: the rematch
More orders per person. The same team would ship about a third more orders without adding a single hire, so the cost to fulfill each order drops.
Fewer fires, fewer refunds. Orders would stop bouncing between steps, so rushed shipments and make-good refunds mostly disappear.
Cash shows up sooner. An order that sits in queues for a day and a half would leave the same day, and the cash for it arrives sooner too.
Where the margin gain comes from
Directional by design: the shape of the gain, not a client's P&L.
Same team, a third more orders. More of every sale survives to the bottom line.
Act three · Build
Our own tools would build it, from the inside.
One coherent operating change. Not four products to manage.
The workshop
Sits inside the work and shapes the new flow around the way the team already operates.
The skill builder
Captures what your experts know and turns it into skills the whole team can lean on.
The pipeline
Carries every build from design to shipped, reviewed and verified at every gate.
Korium
Underneath all three, quietly learning everything the work touches: decisions, reasons, lessons.
The memory layerAI only where it earns its place. People keep the decisions that need them.
The exit
What your key people know becomes shared institutional knowledge.
The company is one resignation away from losing what it knows. It doesn’t have to be.
The know-how lives in two or three heads today. It would move into Korium, your shared memory: the taste, the decisions, the reasons behind them. People can take a vacation, or a better offer, and the company still knows what it knows. The team keeps it. So does whoever you eventually sell to.
The payback
First signal in 30 days. Step change by 90. Then it compounds.
~30 days
First signal. Less rework, fewer reopened decisions, hours coming back.
~90 days
Step change. Roughly 34% more throughput from the same team.
After
Compounding. Recovered revenue funds the next move. The gains hold after we leave.
The point
Your best people get their real jobs back.
The same people, doing the work that actually needs them. A company that keeps what it learns, and is worth more because of it.
One more time, honestly
The story is illustrative. The method is not.
Same eyes, same tools, same willingness to tell you the truth, pointed at your portfolio company. Starting with one place, done right.