Step 2 of 8
FLOW · measure first
Lay bare — price the current state
L is the step that turns opinions into comparability. Before it there are candidates that are all somehow annoying; after it there is an order that can be defended.
The arithmetic is deliberately coarse and honestly labelled. A range of €38,000 to €61,000 supports the same decision as a point value and does not have to be defended later. Anything that cannot be stated in euros is not touched by this method — not because it does not matter, but because it could not be re-measured in Y.
- Answers the question
- What does each candidate cost per year today?
- What the step produces
- An annual cost range in euros per candidate, calculated at fully loaded rates and reproducible on a single page. The list from F becomes sortable.
How the step is carried out
Break the process into steps
Six to twelve. Per step: who performs it, in which system, how long it takes. Fewer than six hides the bottleneck; more than twelve creates effort the added precision does not justify.
Collect times as ranges
Not “twenty minutes” but “ten to forty-five minutes”. Asking for an average gets you the good day; asking how long it takes at worst gets you the rest of the distribution. Both ends are needed.
Use fully loaded rates, not salaries
Gross salary plus employer contributions, workspace, systems and non-productive time. Working from the bare hourly wage understates every process substantially — and understates all of them evenly, which is what makes the error invisible.
Volume times duration times rate, twice
Cases per year × handling time × loaded rate. Once with the lower times, once with the upper ones. The result is the range you carry forward.
Keep waiting time separate
Handling time costs wages; waiting time costs lead time. Merging the two produces a bigger and useless number, because someone waiting for an approval is usually working on something else. Waiting time belongs on its own line with its own consequences: tied-up capital, late invoicing, customers who buy elsewhere meanwhile.
Finished when
- Every candidate carries a range, not a point value.
- The loaded rate is documented and identical across all candidates.
- The arithmetic fits on one page: volume, duration, rate, result.
- The order of the list has changed compared with F. If it has not, either the collection was too coarse or the field from F was too small.
The typical mistake
False precision
“This process costs €47,312” is not a measurement, it is a multiplication with four digits of confidence. The value rests on estimates that vary by a factor of two; the last three digits are invented. The damage arrives later: a point value can be disproved to the euro at re-measurement, a range cannot. Quote an exact figure and you lose the argument about the method before you ever get to the process.
What you can compute yourself
The process cost calculator performs exactly this calculation: volume, duration, loaded rate, range. The maturity calculator adds the second half of the answer — a workflow riddled with exceptions costs more than its step sequence suggests.
Process Cost Analyzer
What a process costs you today, per year, calculated from your inputs, as a range rather than to the cent.
Open calculatorDigitalization Maturity
Where your processes stand today, across five dimensions. A baseline the improvement can later be measured against.
Open calculatorFlowVisual is the instrument this method uses where a questionnaire stops: draw the process, run it hundreds of times, read which step blocks. It is a separate product on its own domain — Flowrefy owns the method, FlowVisual owns the instrument.
The step, worked through
The sample analyses show this arithmetic openly: hourly rate, cases per year, annual cost as a range. The figures are constructed rather than observed — they demonstrate the calculation, not a result.
The analyses are constructed models, not client projects. Their figures show what a measurement would look like — they are not results achieved for anyone.
- Sample analysisAN-2026-08
The sales lead who shows up as two boxes
A packaging printer measures the path from incoming order to order confirmation. The bottleneck is the credit check. The second finding is a role two steps share, and it only becomes an action once the first one is dealt with.
- Sample analysisAN-2026-07
The loudest process in the building is not the most expensive
An engineering consultancy wants to digitalise leave requests. The measurement agrees with the complaint and still not with the investment. The process is slow, but cheap.
- Sample analysisAN-2026-06
The €500 approval limit nobody has touched since
A plastics processor has every purchase above €500 signed by the managing director. The limit is old, the prices are not. Four out of five orders pass through a gate that opens twice a week.
Questions
Gross annual salary plus employer contributions, divided by the hours actually available — not by 2,080, but net of leave, sickness and non-productive time — plus workspace and system costs. The exact figure matters less than consistency: the same rate for every candidate, or the ranking compares assumptions instead of processes.
Not as wage cost. Someone waiting for an approval is working on something else in the meantime. Waiting time costs elsewhere and belongs on its own line: tied-up capital, delayed invoicing, customers who go somewhere else. Those items are carried, but not folded into wages.
Because an expected value hides the spread, and the spread is what decides the bottleneck in O. Two processes with identical mean cost behave completely differently if one varies between ten and fifteen minutes and the other between five and sixty. The range is not vagueness — it is the information.
If you want to know what your process costs: measure it.
Start with the free diagnosis or download FlowVisual. If you want to speak to someone afterwards, we're reachable.
Remote · fixed price · result in euros