CoreLab FlowTrack helps mid-size organisations map, measure, and restructure their core processes so that bottlenecks stop being a quarterly fire drill.
Five working days on-site or remote. We interview process owners, shadow the team, and map the current-state…
4.1 days avg. Order cycle time redEight to twelve weeks depending on workflow complexity. Covers current-state mapping, future-state design, a…
90 days Post-go-live supportSix fortnightly sessions delivered via video call, with asynchronous support between sessions via a shared…
5 working days Diagnostic sprint duIs the Operational Diagnostic Sprint really five days with no ongoing commitment?
Yes. The sprint is a standalone engagement. You receive a bottleneck report and improvement roadmap at the end of day five. There is no obligation to continue…
How do you measure the baseline before making recommendations?
We use a combination of process observation, transaction log analysis, and structured interviews with the people who actually do the work. Where data systems…
Do you work with organisations outside the UK?
The majority of our work is in the UK, but we have delivered remote engagements for clients in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany. On-site work outside the…
Book a 30-minute call with Marcus. No pitch deck, no sales team. Just a direct conversation about your workflow and whether a diagnostic sprint makes sense.
Get startedProcess mapping sounds straightforward until you try to do it accurately. Most organisations have process maps. Most of those maps describe the intended process, not the actual one. The difference between those two things is usually measured in hours of lost time per week, and it is almost always where the improvement opportunity is hiding.
Read more →Cycle time reduction is one of the most requested outcomes in process consulting. It is also one of the most misunderstood. The assumption is usually that the process needs to be speeded up. In most cases, the process does not need to be speeded up. It needs to have the waiting removed from it.
Read more →The business case for workflow automation is usually presented in terms of time saved and errors reduced. Those benefits are real, but they depend on a condition that is rarely stated explicitly: the process being automated needs to be stable, well-documented, and free of informal exception-handling steps that cannot be encoded in a rule set. When that condition is not met, automation creates new problems rather than solving existing ones.
Read more →We document every handoff, every approval gate, and every wait state across a workflow before recommending a single change. Most consultants skip this step. We do not.
Every engagement starts with a baseline measurement. Cycle time, error rate, rework percentage. If we cannot measure it, we do not touch it until we can.
Our deliverable is a running process, not a PDF. We stay on-site or on-call through the first 90 days of any change so that the new workflow actually sticks.
"We had tried to fix our purchase order process twice before. Marcus mapped it in a way that finally made the problem obvious to everyone in the room, including the people who had been living inside it for years."David FenwickHead of Operations, Meridian Components Ltd
"The diagnostic sprint felt almost too short to be useful. Then the report landed and it was the most specific document we had received from any external consultant. We implemented two of the three recommendations within six weeks."Yemi AdeyemiOperations Director, Clearwater Professional Services
Marcus Hale spent eleven years in operations management at a mid-size logistics firm in the East Midlands before founding CoreLab FlowTrack in 2019. He led the firm's fulfilment network restructuring in 2016, cutting average order cycle time from 5.3 days to 2.1 days over fourteen months. He holds a postgraduate certificate in operations management from Loughborough University and completed the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt programme through the British Quality Foundation in 2014. Outside work, Marcus runs a small allotment in Derbyshire and keeps a detailed spreadsheet tracking his seed-to-harvest cycle times, which his associates find both endearing and entirely on-brand.
Yes. The sprint is a standalone engagement. You receive a bottleneck report and improvement roadmap at the end of day five. There is no obligation to continue into a redesign programme. Some clients run the sprint, implement the recommendations internally, and do not need us again. That is a fine outcome.
We use a combination of process observation, transaction log analysis, and structured interviews with the people who actually do the work. Where data systems allow, we pull cycle-time data directly. Where they do not, we time-sample manually over two or three days. We do not estimate baselines. We measure them.
The majority of our work is in the UK, but we have delivered remote engagements for clients in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany. On-site work outside the UK is possible and is scoped on a case-by-case basis, with travel costs agreed in advance.
