Core Process Redesign for a Mid-Market Firm

The company had grown from 200–600 people through organic hiring and two acquisitions, and had never stopped to standardise how work actually got done. Each site had its own approach to order management, its own escalation path, its own way of handling errors. New employees learned the job by watching whoever sat next to them, which meant the errors spread as consistently as the good habits. Managers spent their days correcting mistakes that shouldn't have happened. The CEO used the phrase 'firefighting' in three consecutive board presentations.

A four-week process diagnostic across five core functions, not to document every variation, but to rank 42 identified gaps by error-to-output impact. The redesign was executed in phases, starting with the three functions where errors were costing the most. Process guides were written by the people doing the work, not by the consultants. That's the only way they actually get used.