Who it's for
An owner or COO whose departments report success while the overall result doesn't add up.
Key idea
A joint between functions is a place where no one is responsible for the handoff. Until a handoff has an owner and an acceptance criterion, automation only moves the gap somewhere else.
Contents
- Why joints are the most expensive place
- Four elements of a healthy handoff
- How to find your gaps in one week
- What to automate at the joints
- The metric worth introducing
- What to do this week
Take the self-assessment
Sales hit the plan. Production fulfilled the orders. Logistics shipped. Finance sent the invoices. Every department shows green metrics, yet the customer is unhappy, the margin is below the estimate, and the owner can't explain where the time goes.
This is the classic picture of functional optimization: each part works well, the whole works badly. The reason is that the metrics measure functions, while value is created by an end-to-end process that runs through those functions.
Principle
A department can't be efficient in isolation from the process. The local maximum of one function is almost always reached at the expense of the next.
Why joints are the most expensive place
Inside a function there's a manager, a procedure and clear responsibility. At a joint there's none of that: the handoff happens between two areas of responsibility and formally belongs to neither.
Hence the typical symptoms: an order "went to production" and for a week no one there knew it had arrived; an invoice was issued against an outdated specification; a customer was promised a delivery date no one had confirmed. Every participant acted in good faith.
Joint What gets lost What's usually missing
Marketing → Sales The context and priority of the request A qualification criterion shared by both sides
Sales → Delivery The real commitments made to the customer Confirmation that it's feasible before promising
Delivery → Finance The actual costs of the order Recording deviations at the moment they occur
Finance → Owner The reasons for deviations from the plan A link between the number and a management decision
Support → Product Customers' recurring problems A feedback route with an owner
Four elements of a healthy handoff
Any handoff between functions can be described with four parameters. A gap appears wherever at least one is missing.
- 01
A readiness criterion for the handoff
What must be true for the work to be handed over. Not "the salesperson closed the deal," but "the specification is confirmed, the timeline is agreed with production, the prepayment has been received."
- 02
An acceptance criterion
The receiving side's right to refuse the work and send it back with a stated reason. Without this right, the quality of handoffs will fall to the minimum tolerable level.
- 03
A handoff owner
A specific person responsible for making sure the handoff happened. Named by name: a department can't hold responsibility. It's usually the receiving side, because they have the motivation.
- 04
A delay signal
An automatic notification if the handoff didn't happen on time. Without a signal, the gap is discovered at the next stage, which means late and at a high cost.
A common mistake
Companies try to solve the joint problem with meetings. A meeting is a manual substitute for a missing handoff mechanism. It helps while it's being held and stops working as soon as volume grows.
How to find your gaps in one week
You don't need a consultant or a forty-page process map. You need one order, traced from first contact to money in the bank.
- 01 Take three completed orders: one typical, one problematic, one large.
- 02 For each, reconstruct the timeline by date: when what happened and how much time passed between events.
- 03 Mark the intervals where nothing happened for more than a day. These are your queues.
- 04 For each queue, ask: who was waiting at that moment, and for what exactly? "We were waiting until someone was free" means workload. "We didn't know it was time" means a broken handoff.
- 05 Mark the moments where information was entered again. Every re-entry is a potential data discrepancy.
- 06 Calculate how much calendar time delivery took and how much of it was actual work. The difference is usually striking.
It often turns out that people actually work on an order for only a small part of the total time. The rest of the time it's waiting for a handoff.
What to automate at the joints
System integration is useful exactly to the extent that it removes a manual handoff. Check the candidates against three signs.
- The data is passed in the same fields and doesn't need interpretation when transferred.
- There's a criterion by which readiness for handoff can be determined programmatically.
- A refusal to accept can be expressed as a finite list of reasons.
If even one sign is missing, integration will create a new problem: the system will pass along data whose quality no one checks, and the discrepancies will surface months later.
Related service: System Integrations
When the gaps have been found and the parts need to be connected so data isn't entered twice.
Related service: Business Process Optimization
If the process itself needs to be documented and stabilized first.
The metric worth introducing
One end-to-end metric is more useful than ten functional ones: the time from a customer's request to a fulfilled commitment. It doesn't belong to any department, so it forces everyone to look at the process as a whole.
The second most useful is the share of orders that went through without being sent back to a previous stage. It shows the quality of handoffs directly and usually sparks the most substantive conversations at team meetings.
Success criterion
Joints have stopped being a problem when the system learns about a delay before the customer does, and when sending work back to a previous stage is treated as an event to be reviewed.
What to do this week
Questions to ask yourself
Trace one order from start to finish
- 01 How many calendar days did it take, and on how many of them did anyone actually work on it?
- 02 At which points was information entered again?
- 03 Where was it sent back to a previous stage, and why?
- 04 Which handoff in your process has no owner named by name?
- 05 How do you find out that a handoff didn't happen: from the system or from the customer?
Materials that continue the topic
- Why automation speeds up chaos
- A CRM people trust
