I challenge this: How do you measure processing time? From first customer interaction? Or from all input data are present? I assume in most situations they are not present upfront. Therefore it’s a tedious back and forth. Sure, that compounds with the roundtrip time. Digitisation is a trap because it doesn’t change the paradigm to full-kit upfront necessarily. Digitisation can be a nice entry-point to this, but unfortunately digitising data does not necessarily introduce the full-kit.

The system needs to be designed in a different way: “We guarantee processing within x hours (weekdays) from the point you’ve provided us a full-kit.”

This, in turn, requires thinking backwards from the result through all steps, resulting in a definition of what a full-kit entails. Of course this requires a different (system) thinking which is contradicted by the rigid hierarchy (and no, doing away with the hierarchy isn’t a solution either).

Work force would not be busy 80% of their time = capacity to go back and forth to figure what’s missing and switch around cases. When starting with full-kit, 80% of their wasted time becomes processing time. In turn, their throughput was 20%, it goes up to 100%, or x5.