Bottleneck pattern
Order-to-Fulfillment Handoffs
An order crosses several departments before it ships, and at each handoff someone re-types or re-checks information that already existed upstream.
Signs to look for
- The same order gets entered into more than one system or spreadsheet.
- Errors get caught late, after the order has already moved downstream.
- Nobody can say, without asking around, exactly where an order currently sits.
What fixing it looks like
One order record that moves through every department instead of being re-created by each one — so a handoff is a status change, not a new data-entry task, and an error gets caught where it happens instead of two steps later.
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