Workflow Efficiency

What's the least efficient element in your workflow?

I've been asking this question in consulting conversations for years, and the answers always surprise me. Not because they're unique, but because they're so common:

A billion-dollar manufacturer was managing an active inventory of 10,000’s of parts across different teams across multiple locations, all working with many suppliers.  The communication was many-to-many between purchasers and suppliers.  With everyone striving for just-in-time inventory in an ever-changing landscape of production schedules and volume (demand), parts availability (supply), and commodity pricing, where no one wants to hold inventory for long.  This was managed using a spreadsheet/email workflow.  The kind of setup where you're never quite sure whether you are looking at the single source of truth, and important information is buried under an avalanche of (often irrelevant) data.

A national resource company has five distinct field officer roles managing workflows across different areas: safety, contractors, production, environmental, and compliance. Each role has its own responsibilities and workflow, supported by manual, “press hard, you are making three copies” level of paperwork.  That physical paperwork would then pass through many hands as work progressed.  The workload alone was staggeringly inefficient and stressful, from collection right through to archiving.  But the real issues? The inability to do effective reporting, and the risk exposure if they ever faced an audit with no unified view of their inspection history.

Both organizations knew these systems were holding them back. Both had grown into inefficiency gradually, one workaround at a time, until the workaround became the System.  These weren't failing companies. They were highly successful and profitable operations that had simply outgrown their “manual” tools.  Both are easily solved via web portals into live data, which enforces workflow and shows only the data that is relevant to each user and their specific task at hand.

What's the biggest operational frustration you've encountered recently? I'm curious what patterns others are seeing.