Summary
A logistics operations team was running on processes designed for a business half its size. Manual steps, disconnected systems, and no real-time visibility meant missed SLAs, constant firefighting, and a team that was exhausted. I led a structured operations redesign—mapping, redesigning, and implementing new processes across all three hubs.
Headline result: Processing time dropped 45%. SLA compliance went from 71% to 94%. The team recovered 1,200 staff-hours per quarter.
Context
The company had grown through acquisition, which meant the operations team was running three slightly different versions of the same process across three hubs. No standardization, no shared visibility, and no clear ownership of the end-to-end flow.
The CEO had set a strategic goal of expanding to two new markets within 18 months. The existing operations model couldn’t support that growth. My role was to get operations ready to scale.
The Problem
A two-week observation and interview phase revealed three systemic issues:
- Fragmented workflows. Each hub had its own process documentation (where documentation existed at all). A task that took 20 minutes in Hub A took 45 minutes in Hub B, for no defensible reason.
- Manual data entry at every handoff. Information was re-entered at each stage of the process—four times in the standard flow. Each re-entry was an opportunity for error.
- No real-time visibility. Supervisors had no live view of throughput or queue depth. By the time a delay was visible, it had already caused an SLA miss.
Team morale was a secondary problem. The staff knew the processes were broken and felt unsupported.
My Role
I owned the full program:
- Led a 3-week discovery phase: 40+ interviews, process mapping sessions, and data analysis
- Facilitated cross-hub workshops to align on the target-state process design
- Managed a 5-person working group through the redesign and implementation phases
- Owned the rollout plan across three locations
- Built and maintained the stakeholder communication strategy (CEO, COO, hub managers)
- Ran a structured 60-day post-implementation review
Approach & Key Decisions
Observation before analysis. The first two weeks were spent in the hubs, watching the actual work happen. Every process map built from interviews alone misses the real bottlenecks. Watching revealed a critical delay at a specific handoff that no one had named as a problem—because everyone had normalized it.
Standardize the 80%, respect the 20%. My initial instinct was full standardization. Hub managers pushed back: some variation was intentional and reflected real operational differences. We defined a common core process and documented the legitimate variations as options. This protected buy-in without sacrificing the efficiency gains.
Automate the re-entry, not the judgment. We eliminated three of the four manual re-entry steps by connecting the existing systems via a lightweight integration. This was a 3-week technical effort, not a platform migration. The judgment calls stayed with the humans.
Involve the team in designing their own process. The people doing the work knew where the friction was. Involving them in the design phase turned potential resistors into advocates. Hub managers co-owned the rollout.
Phase the rollout. We piloted at the smallest hub first. This gave us a real-world test before committing to the other two hubs and gave Hub A staff a 4-week head start before they became informal trainers for their colleagues.
Outcome & Results
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average processing time | 52 min | 28 min | −45% |
| SLA compliance rate | 71% | 94% | +23 pts |
| Manual re-entry steps | 4 | 1 | −75% |
| Staff-hours recovered (quarterly) | — | 1,200 hrs | — |
| Team satisfaction score | 6.1 / 10 | 8.3 / 10 | +2.2 pts |
The recovered capacity directly funded the expansion program. Two new market launches followed within 14 months—ahead of the 18-month target.
Key Lessons
The process you observe is not the process on paper. The gap between documented process and actual behavior was significant in every hub. The real process only appears when you watch.
Change management is not separate from project management. I treated the communication plan, the workshop facilitation, and the team recognition moments as project deliverables—not afterthoughts. The pilot hub’s early adoption was the direct result.
Small integrations beat platform migrations. The temptation was to propose a new operations platform. Instead, we connected the tools people already trusted. Faster to deliver, higher adoption, lower risk.