That Recurring Delay? Here’s How to Find Its Root Cause in 90 Minutes.

By Express HR Solutions on 2025-08-20 16:39:43

It’s 3 PM on a Wednesday. You’re walking the floor of your plant in Manesar, and you see it again. The same familiar cluster of people and paperwork at the dispatch gate. Trucks are lined up, drivers are sipping chai, and goods that should be on the highway to Jaipur are still sitting on your dock.

Bay 7 is running 45 minutes behind schedule. Again.

Sound familiar? You've heard all the excuses. "System is slow, sir." "Traffic from the supplier." "New person on the line today." It's frustrating, because it's not a crisis; it's a slow, steady drain on your plant's efficiency. These small, recurring delays are like a thousand tiny cuts that bleed your productivity dry.

What if you could cut through the noise and find the real reason in the time it takes to watch half a movie?

Forget week-long Six Sigma projects for a moment. Here’s a rapid, on-the-ground audit you, as a plant manager or logistics head, can run to get to the heart of the matter.

The 90-Minute Challenge: Your Clock Starts Now

Here’s the drill. Block out the next 90 minutes in your calendar. No emails, no review meetings.

Grab a notepad, walk directly to the delay node—that specific point on the assembly line, that frustrating dispatch bay, that chaotic receiving dock—and get the frontline supervisor and a couple of operators together. For the next hour and a half, this is your only priority.

We’re going to diagnose the problem across four key areas: Process, People, Technology, and Vendor.

The 4 Questions to Isolate the Real Bottleneck

Ask your team these four questions, in this order. Don't let them off with vague answers. Ask them to show you.

Question 1: The PROCESS Audit ("Map the Mess")

What to ask: "Forget the official SOP for a minute. Show me, step-by-step, exactly what you do to get this pallet from here to inside that truck. Draw it for me. Where does it get stuck every single time?"

What you're looking for: The gap between the process on paper and the process in reality. Is there a pointless approval step that requires a signature from a supervisor who is never there? Is the physical layout forcing a worker to walk 50 metres back and forth for every single box?

Real Indian Example: A Chennai-based warehouse discovered their gate delays weren't due to slow loading, but a mandatory, manual security logbook entry that took three minutes per truck. On a busy day, this single, outdated process step created a two-hour backlog.

Question 2: The PEOPLE Audit ("Check the Training")

What to ask: "Who is officially trained to do this job? Were all of you trained the exact same way? When a new person starts, who shows them how it's done? Is everyone 100% clear on what their specific role is in this task?"

What you're looking for: Inconsistency. You might find that only one "hero" employee, let's call him Ramesh, knows the right way to use the system, and when he's on his tea break, everything grinds to a halt. Or maybe the contract labour on the second shift was given a quick 10-minute briefing, while permanent staff got a full day of training.

Real Indian Example: A plant manager found that dispatch errors spiked after lunch because the more experienced morning shift staff never did a proper handover to the afternoon contract workers, who had been trained on an older version of the dispatch software.

Question 3: The TECHNOLOGY Audit ("Blame the Machine?")

What to ask: "Show me the tool you use for this step—the scanner, the computer, the printer. Does it work instantly, every time? How often does it crash, lag, or give an error? Be honest."

What you're looking for: Faulty, outdated, or poorly understood tech. It's easy for staff to just say "the system is slow," but you need to see it in action. Is the Wi-Fi signal weak in that corner of the warehouse, causing the handheld scanners to constantly drop connection? Is the label printer ancient and prone to jamming?

Real Indian Example: A logistics head in Pune realised a recurring delay at a packing station was caused by a single faulty barcode scanner. It misread 1 out of every 5 labels, forcing the operator to manually type in a 16-digit code, wasting precious seconds that added up to hours.

Question 4: The VENDOR Audit ("Look Outside")

What to ask: "Who outside our company is involved right before or during this step? A transporter? A parts supplier? Are their trucks, parts, or documents consistently on time and exactly as we specified?"

What you're looking for: Hidden dependencies on third parties. Your team might be perfectly efficient, but they can't start their work until a vendor does theirs correctly.

Real Indian Example: A factory in Sriperumbudur traced its assembly line delays to a specific component supplier who, to save costs, was using flimsy packaging. This meant the receiving team had to spend 20 minutes inspecting every single box for damage before they could accept it into inventory.

Putting It All Together: From Diagnosis to Action

By the end of these 90 minutes, you'll have moved past the vague excuses and have a clear, actionable diagnosis.

Instead of just knowing "Bay 7 is slow," you'll know that "The delay in Bay 7 is a PEOPLE issue because the second-shift contract staff weren't properly trained on the new handheld TECHNOLOGY, forcing them to revert to an old, inefficient manual PROCESS."

See the difference? Now you can take targeted action. You're not just fire-fighting the symptom; you're solving the root cause.

Often, as you'll discover, these 'process' or 'tech' problems are actually people problems in disguise—gaps in training, inconsistent staffing, or the wrong skills in the wrong roles. Fixing the human element is the fastest way to build a resilient operation.

If your 90-minute audit consistently points back to people-powered problems, the team at Express HR Solutions specialises in providing the skilled, well-trained manpower that turns bottlenecks into breakthroughs.