The new hire whose desk stays empty
A logistics provider prepares new hires in four parallel branches. Almost one in three is not ready to work on day one. Not because a role is overloaded, but because a gate is waiting for the last branch.
No step costs more than half an hour of work, and it still takes almost 15 working days until someone is ready to work. Four branches run side by side, and nobody is ready until all four are done. The slowest one always wins.
14.6working days
In 8 of 10 cases between 10.7 and 21.7 days.
Ausrüstung beschaffen
In 75 of 100 simulated runs this step was the hold-up.
€35,000
Per year. Estimated between €26,000 and €47,000.
€28,000
Per year. Estimated between €19,500 and €39,000.
Employee onboarding
- Industry
- Logistics provider
- Size
- 240 Mitarbeitende
- Cases per year
- 180
- Fully loaded rate
- €58 / h
- Simulated runs
- 120,000
- Date
- June 2026
New colleagues arrive on day one with no equipment, no access or no safety briefing. HR says it hands over in good time. Purchasing says the supplier takes what the supplier takes. Health and safety says the briefing runs every two weeks and that is that. All three are right.
180 hires a year, five steps, four roles, a €58 fully loaded rate. Between signature and agreed start date the model assumes 8 to 35 working days. What is measured is the time from signature to full readiness, including the calendar chains: equipment delivery time, the date of the safety briefing, the weekly HR round. Modelled and simulated over 120,000 runs.
Six steps, four roles, one measurable path
The process modelled in FlowVisual. ↯ marks a media break — the point where data is retyped from one system into the next.
| Step | Role | System | Duration P10–P90 | Bottleneck |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Vertrag & Stammdaten | Personal | Papier / HR-System↯ | 20–45 min | 3 % |
| 02IT-Konto & Rechte | IT | Ticketsystem | 15–40 min | 0 % |
| 03Ausrüstung beschaffenBottleneck | Einkauf | E-Mail / Lieferant↯ | 10–30 min | 75 % |
| 04Sicherheitsunterweisung | Arbeitssicherheit | Excel / Kalender↯ | 10–25 min | 21 % |
| 05Zugangsausweis | Personal | Papierformular↯ | 8–20 min | 1 % |
120,000 runs, one clear answer
Every chart below shows before against after. Values are labelled directly — the colour is a second signal, never the only one.
5
Eintritte/Woche
63 %
10.7–21.7working days
Ausrüstung beschaffen — 75 %
All five steps together add up to under two hours of work. Median lead time is 14.6 working days. What sits between those two numbers is not an overloaded person, it is waiting, and mostly calendar waiting: the equipment delivery time, the two-week rhythm of the safety briefing, the weekly HR round.
In 75 % of runs the binding branch is procuring the equipment. It is the only one whose end date a supplier decides. That branch takes a median of 9.5 days; the work inside it takes 10 to 30 minutes.
No role runs above 69 % utilisation. And yet on 63 % of working days at least one role ends the day with more work outstanding than it can clear in a day. That is not a contradiction, it is the difference between utilisation and backlog: utilisation is a monthly average, backlog is Tuesday morning.
The price shows up on day one: 30 % of new hires are not fully able to work on the agreed start date. On average almost one working day per hire is lost before someone improvises.
Equipment comes off the shelf, not from a supplier.
The reflex would have been an onboarding tool with checklists and reminders. The measurement says the problem is not a forgotten task, it is a delivery time. Reminders do not speed up a freight forwarder.
The intervention would be a single change: keep a small stock for the three standard workplace setups and issue it on arrival instead of ordering per hire. The branch would fall from 9.5 days to 1.0.
Everything else would stay as it is: same roles, same systems, same briefing rhythm.
Median lead time down 25 %
- How long it takes
- 14.6 → 10.9 working days
- Throughput
- 5 → 6
- Days over capacity
- 63 % → 58 %
- Saving per year
- €28,000
The most expensive branch would almost disappear, from 9.5 to 1.0 days, a drop of 89 %. Median lead time would fall from 14.6 to 10.9 days, a drop of 26 %. Nine tenths of the branch removed, a quarter of the time gained.
That is not a disappointment, it is arithmetic. Four branches run side by side and the date only holds when all four hold. Shorten the longest and you inherit the second longest: the safety briefing runs every ten working days and would then be the binding branch in 65 % of runs, up from 21 %.
The financial return does not sit in the days anyway, it sits on day one: the share of hires who cannot start work would fall from 30 % to 9 %, and idle time per hire from 0.96 to 0.18 working days.
Going further would need neither purchasing nor a tool, but a second briefing date each month. That too is a scheduling question, not a capacity question, which is why it would call for a fresh measurement first.
What this analysis cannot tell you
Every measurement has limits. A measurement that hides them is advertising.
- 01
This is a sample analysis. Process, roles and timings are constructed from typical mid-market structures, not collected at a client. It shows what an analysis looks like. It does not show what your result will be.
- 02
Lead time here includes the calendar chains: the weekly HR round, equipment delivery, the two-week cycle of the safety briefing and badge production. They account for most of the near-15 days; the handling work itself adds up to under two hours. Run the same process without the calendar (handling plus queueing only, the way the shipped FlowVisual template does) and the median comes out at roughly one day instead of 14.6. Both calculations are correct and answer different questions: one says how long the organisation takes, the other how long the work takes.
- 03
“Days over capacity” here means: on that share of working days, at least one role ends the day with more work outstanding than it can clear in a day. It does not mean anyone worked overtime.
- 04
Idle time on day one is valued at 45 % of a working day and capped after five days. Nobody sits still for a week. Both are assumptions, not measurements; the costing carries them as a range from 25 % to 60 %.
- 05
The lead time between signature and start date is modelled as a triangular distribution from 8 to 35 working days. Hire further ahead and you have neither this problem nor a need for this intervention.
- 06
Tied-up capital and storage space for the equipment stock are not netted off against the saving. Both depend on the setup you choose.
- 07
“Throughput” here is the ceiling the scarcest role allows, not the volume that actually arrives. That is 3.6 hires per week.
- 08
P10–P90 is not a worst case. In 10 % of cases it takes longer than the P90 value.
Your process will look different.
This analysis is a sample. Your numbers are not. With FlowVisual you model your own process and get the same evaluation — on your machine, with your values.