Sarah had a problem.
She was responsible for improving the onboarding process at her company, and although she had a rough idea of where things felt slow, there were dozens of steps, handoffs, and approvals involved. Guessing wasn’t going to cut it.
Like any brilliant analyst, she created a model of her process and ran a simulation using ProcessModel. The simulation demonstrated precisely how the process functioned—but she still had a significant question: Where should I start?
That’s when she clicked the Hot Spot Evaluator.
In seconds, the system scanned the entire process and highlighted the 10 areas that had the biggest impact on total throughput time. No digging, no filtering—just a clean, ranked list. One activity stood out: “Background Check.”
The work content for this activity took only 5 minutes, but it appeared in red, with a high impact score. It turns out that tiny step was a common bottleneck for all applicants, but not because of the time it took. The real problem was “when” the activity occurred — “the time between the times.” The submission and reporting of the background checks only happened on Thursday at three PM. Building the model required Sarah to identify when activities happened. After running the model, the hotspot evaluator highlighted the criticality of the delays.
Sarah focused her team’s energy there first. With one tweak—automating that step—she cut the total onboarding time by 44%. So, how did she make the change in 15 minutes? First, all outgoing submissions of background checks needed to be submitted to the contractor as soon as they arrived in HR, approximately 6 per day. Second, the background check contractor included a built-in option to send completed requests directly to the requestor and additional recipients via email. They no longer had to wait for HR to check for completed requests. This allowed the requesting department to receive notification within minutes of completion. Sarah mused that these changes sound simple, but the process problems had not been visible for more than four years.
Later, when presenting her results to the executive team, she supported it with the complete Impact Analysis report, illustrating how value-added and non-value-added work impacted the process. Imagine how excited management was when they discovered that they could reduce the time it takes to onboard an employee by 44%, implement it at no cost, benefit over 1,200 new employees each year, and have it take effect immediately.
But it all started with a simple question: Where should I begin?
And the Hot Spot Evaluator gave her the answer in seconds.
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