How to Audit Your Company for Wasted Work in a Single Afternoon

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Many companies lose significant time to redundant processes, but identifying them does not require a lengthy transformation program. A practical audit involves selecting three high-frequency workflows, tracing a real recent example of each from start to finish, and recording both active processing time and total elapsed time separately. Key inefficiencies to flag include duplicate data entry across multiple systems, queues where work sits idle awaiting approvals or responses, and manual checks that may no longer serve a purpose. Each identified issue should be given an estimated annual cost and ranked by impact, then categorised as something to delete, fix at the team level, or escalate to an engineering solution. Crucially, every accepted action must be assigned a single owner and the workflow should be measured again after changes are made to confirm improvement.

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