Mikita Malyshau

Orders were leaving late and the backlog grew daily. I was asked how do we work faster. What I ended up answering was where does an order actually lose its time, and those are not the same question: the first assumes the answer is effort, the second assumes nothing.

Three explanations fitted. Not enough people died, because nobody was idle but nobody was saturated. Not working hard enough died, because output per person held steady across the shift. What held was that time was lost between people rather than inside them: orders were sitting still, not moving slowly.

Every one of the six did their own step well. The moment a task left someone’s hands it stopped being anyone’s. So I asked them where orders waited, because they could see it and I could not, and between them they already knew. We put one name against each step and made every handoff explicit. Nothing was bought and nobody worked longer hours, because the constraint was never a resource.

The harder part was being the youngest person there and asking six older colleagues to change how they worked. It held because the answer was theirs rather than mine, and that is the reason I ask before I propose.

What I got wrong: I never measured the baseline. Management reported a twenty per cent gain and I accepted someone else’s arithmetic for my own result. If I ran it again I would time ten orders before touching anything. Every baseline I have measured since, I have measured myself.

Nobody suggested it. Both ran underneath the warehouse job above. Inventory, pricing, supplier terms and the P&L were mine, and there was nobody to hand a decision to.

Both were later sold.

I asked for this one. After two years answering only to my own numbers I wanted a set somebody else would check. Reconciled entries in 1C:Enterprise, processed invoices, tracked payments, and worked to a month-end close that did not move for anybody.

High volume, multilingual, cash and card. Daily revenue reconciliation and end-of-shift cash reporting. The least glamorous role here and the one that showed me where reported revenue and actual cash stop agreeing.

Confirmed, not hoped for. Cross-training across A/R and A/P, deliberately, because together they are the working capital cycle and I want to have seen it from the inside before anyone asks me to model it.