Step 5 of 8
REFY · then refine
Reduce — strip the ballast
R is the first step that changes anything and the cheapest one. It still gets skipped routinely, because it looks like work rather than progress: a deleted approval step cannot be demonstrated to anyone, a new tool can.
The test is necessity, not elegance. Every step has to carry a decision that actually gets made. Anything that has run for years because of one incident long ago is not a process step, it is a scar.
- Answers the question
- What can go before anything gets built?
- What the step produces
- A process with fewer steps, fewer system changes and fewer waiting loops — with no licence bought.
How the step is carried out
Hold each step against its purpose
Which decision depends on this step, and how often in the last twelve months did it come out differently from the default? Where the answer is “never”, the step is a candidate for deletion.
Count the media breaks
Every point where a person moves data from one system into another. Each break is a source of error and a waiting point at the same time. The number of breaks before and after this step is one of the most honest metrics a process has.
Look for duplicate entry
The same fact held in two systems. Usually one of them is the system of record and the other is maintained out of habit — often by someone who does not know that nobody reads it.
Open up the waiting loops
Batch runs, fixed dates, weekly approval rounds. Move a weekly batch to daily and mean waiting time drops by days at no cost. It is the largest lever in this step and the one most often missed, because waiting time appears on no payroll.
Introduce thresholds instead of case-by-case checks
Rather than approving every order: everything below a set amount passes, everything above is checked, and a sample is reviewed afterwards. This is not a loosening of control but a decision about where control costs something and where it buys something.
Finished when
- The process demonstrably has fewer steps than before R — counted, not felt.
- Every remaining step has a nameable purpose and a decision it carries.
- For every deleted step it is on record who agreed to the deletion.
- The number of media breaks has fallen, or is explicitly justified as unavoidable.
- Nothing has been bought up to this point.
The typical mistake
Automating the mess
A process with four redundant approvals does not get better through automation, it gets faster at being wrong — and those four approvals are then written into a tool that somebody has to maintain. Every later change costs configuration effort on top. Clearing ballast has the best effort-to-effect ratio in the whole cycle, and it is skipped because it cannot be shown off.
What you can compute yourself
There is no calculator for R — it is a series of decisions, not a computation. The maturity calculator does indicate in advance how much ballast to expect: many exceptions and no settled sequence mean R, not F, will be the real lever.
The step, worked through
The intervention section of a sample analysis rarely begins with technology. It begins with deletions and changed rules. Whatever appears there before the software is this step.
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.
Further reading
Process Optimization Without an IT Department: Here's How
No IT department? No problem. 5 ways to optimize your processes without programming knowledge.
From Excel to Digital Workflows: The Migration Guide
Your Excel spreadsheets are getting unmanageable? Here's how to migrate step by step to professional workflow tools - without data loss.
Questions
By its rejection rate. Someone who grants two hundred approvals a year and has never refused one is not exercising control, they are performing a ceremony. The replacement is a threshold plus a sample review afterwards — the same assurance for a fraction of the waiting time.
It has to exist as a step sequence from L and O, or nobody knows what is being deleted. A full documentation to some standard is not required and would in fact get in the way here: what is about to be deleted does not need to be described first.
Then it stays, without further discussion. Four-eyes principles, retention duties and audit steps from a certification are not candidates for R. What can still be examined is whether they sit at the right point in the sequence — a mandatory check at the start causes less rework than the same check at the end.
If you want to know what your process costs: measure it.
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