BU 506 Unit 2 process walk and waste analysis example

Twenty-Four Business Days, Two Hours of Work: A Process Walk and Waste Analysis of One Special Order at a Composite Columbus Flooring Retailer

Student Name

Business, Herzing University

BU 506: Leading Change and Operational Excellence

Instructor Name

January 19, 2026

Twenty-Four Business Days, Two Hours of Work: A Process Walk and Waste Analysis of One Special Order at a Composite Columbus Flooring Retailer

The Walk

This paper follows one special order through the process selected in Unit 1, from the customer's deposit to material staged for installation. The order was chosen at random from deposits taken on December 2, 2025, at the Westerville showroom: 640 square feet of luxury vinyl plank for a kitchen and family room, a product that must ship from a single dye lot so the color matches across the floor. I followed it in real time over the following five weeks, watching the steps at the warehouse myself and asking the people at each earlier step to show me what they did when the order reached them. The walk records steps in the order they actually happened, not the order the company's written procedure describes.

Womack and Jones (2003) recommend following a single product through every step because averages hide where time goes. Shah and Ward (2007) describe lean production as an integrated system aimed at reducing waste and variability in supplier, customer and internal processes; this walk applies that lens to an office and warehouse process rather than a factory line.

What Happened, Step by Step

The order took 24 business days from deposit to staging. The work itself, every minute someone was actually handling it, came to about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Roughly 99 percent of the elapsed time was waiting.

The Written Process and the Walked Process

The company's special-order procedure, last revised in 2019, describes a shorter process. Rather than reproduce it, I note the four places where the walk departed from it. These are treated as findings about the process, not as mistakes by the people doing the work.

First, the procedure says consultants enter orders directly into the business system. In practice they write on paper, because the order screen asks for manufacturer product codes and carton counts that consultants do not know while sitting with a customer. Second, the procedure says purchasing places orders twice a day. In practice the buyer works the queue once each morning because the afternoon is spent on manufacturer calls. Third, the procedure says receiving checks dye lot numbers on arrival. In practice receiving counts cartons only, because the purchase order shows no lot requirement for receiving to check against. Fourth, the procedure says material is staged within one day of receipt. In practice staging works from the oldest install date first, so an order received early waits on the rack.

Each departure has a sensible reason. The procedure describes a process the system and the staffing do not support.

Classifying What Was Seen

The waste categories used here come from the Toyota Production System as Ohno (1988) described it: overproduction, waiting, transportation, overprocessing, inventory, motion and defects. Liker (2004) adds an eighth, unused employee creativity, which proved relevant.

Waiting

Waiting dominated. The order waited in the showroom tray, the purchasing queue, the reply to an email, the manufacturer's acknowledgment and the receiving rack. Some of that waiting is unavoidable, since manufacturing and freight take time, but about 5 business days of it, the tray, the queue, the email reply and the rack, came from how internal handoffs are batched.

Overprocessing

The quantity was calculated twice by two people using two units: square feet by the consultant and cartons by the administrator, followed by the buyer's own check. Each calculation is a chance to make an error, and none adds anything the customer would pay for.

Defects

Two cartons from the wrong lot meant a replacement order and 6 more business days. The defect was created when the original order went out without a lot requirement and was found only at staging, the last step before the customer.

Inventory

The material sat on the receiving rack for 3 days after it arrived. During that time nobody knew whether it was complete or correct.

Unused creativity

Both showroom administrators I spoke to described the lot problem and the carton problem without being asked, and one had built her own carton calculator in a spreadsheet. The process has no step at which that knowledge is collected.

Transportation and motion were minor, and there is no overproduction in a process that orders exactly one customer's material. The staging clerk does walk the length of the rack to find an order's cartons, but that is minutes against days of waiting.

What the Walk Suggests for Unit 3

The walk points to the defect step as the most important single finding. The mixed lot added 6 business days to this order, more than all the internal batching combined, and the reason column on my tracking sheet suggests that material problems found at staging are the most common reason an order misses its date. Unit 3 tests what causes those problems across all 59 late orders rather than this one.

References

Liker, J. K. (2004). The Toyota way: 14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer. McGraw-Hill.

Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota production system: Beyond large-scale production. Productivity Press.

Shah, R., & Ward, P. T. (2007). Defining and developing measures of lean production. Journal of Operations Management, 25(4), 785-805. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2007.01.019

Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2003). Lean thinking: Banish waste and create wealth in your corporation (Rev. ed.). Free Press.