Operational Efficiency ConsultingMeasure · Simplify · Automate · Sustain

What does an operational efficiency consultant actually do?

The job is to find where time and money leave a process, prove it with numbers, and change the cause. In practice that means sitting with the people who do the work, timing each step as it happens, and following the job from the moment it arrives to the moment it is finished.

The output is not a slide of opinions. It is a timed map of the process, a list of leaks each costed per year, the cause behind each one, and a change plan the team can run. A good consultant then comes back and times the same process again, because an improvement nobody measured afterwards is only a claim.

Where does the time actually go in a slow process?

Usually into waiting. Two numbers explain most of it: lead time, the elapsed time from start to finish, and touch time, the minutes someone is actually working on the job. In many processes the gap between them is far larger than anyone expects, because the job spends most of its life in a queue, an inbox or an approval.

That is why speeding up the people doing the work rarely helps much. The larger gains come from the places the job sits still:

• Queues in front of a busy person or team
• Handovers, where context is lost and work waits to be picked up
• Approvals that nobody remembers the reason for
• Large batches released once a day instead of as they are ready

How do you put a number on an inefficiency?

Multiply three things: the hours a leak costs each time it happens, how often it happens, and what an hour of that work costs the business. The result is an annual figure for each leak, and it turns a list of complaints into a ranked case that a finance lead can check.

The ranking regularly surprises people. The problem everyone complains about is often a small number, while a quiet five-minute task repeated all day by a whole team turns out to be the expensive one. Costing also gives the change plan its order: fix the largest leak whose cause you can reach, then measure again before moving to the next.

Process change or automation: which should come first?

Process change, almost always. Automating a process that has a needless approval, a duplicate data entry or work arriving in the wrong order makes the waste faster and harder to see, and you pay a license fee for the privilege.

Once the process is simplified, what remains is the work that genuinely has to happen. Some of it is repetitive, rule-based and high volume, and that is where software pays; the review names those steps and what automating them would be worth per year. At Miracuves that part moves to the automation service, and the efficiency review can conclude that no software is needed at all.

Which process should you review first?

Pick one that runs often, crosses at least one handover, and that people already describe as slow or frustrating. Frequency matters because a leak is multiplied by every repetition, and handovers matter because that is where most of the waiting sits.

Avoid starting with a process that changes every week or runs only a few times a year: there is not enough repetition to time it credibly. Order handling, invoicing and approvals, customer onboarding, support escalations and month-end reporting are common first choices. One process measured properly tells you whether a wider review is worth paying for, and if the numbers say it is not, that is a useful answer too.

What should you prepare before an efficiency review starts?

Very little paperwork, and more agreement than most teams expect. The review goes faster when these are settled in the written scope before any timing begins:

• The process in scope, with a clear start and end point
• The people who do the work, and permission to speak with them
• Any operational data that already exists, shared after the NDA
• The measure of success, agreed now so it cannot be reframed later
• Whether the aim is capacity or headcount, stated openly at the start