The Power of Time: How Business Process Management Reveals the Hidden Capacity Within Your Organization

In every organization, people often work harder than ever — yet results seem to stagnate. Files pile up, service standards slip, and teams feel stretched thin. The problem isn’t effort — it’s invisible inefficiency.

Through Business Process Management (BPM) and time-based capacity analysis, organizations can uncover where time is truly being spent, how much capacity exists within the current workforce, and what bottlenecks are quietly capping performance.

Step 1: Measuring What’s Really Happening

Most teams can describe their workflow — but very few can quantify it. A time study bridges this gap. By breaking down each phase of a process (Intake, Analysis, Execution, Closing, etc.) and assigning estimated minutes per activity, we can calculate the total flow time required to complete a case or transaction from start to finish.

When combined with the team’s available working minutes (for example, 7,200 minutes per person per month), this becomes a measurable model of process capacity — how many units of work your process can handle versus how many it actually does.

This approach transforms subjective pain points (“we’re overwhelmed”) into measurable insights (“our utilization rate is 120% — demand exceeds available time”).

Step 2: Finding the Bottlenecks

One of the most powerful outcomes of a BPM analysis is the ability to pinpoint where flow breaks down.

You may find that:

• Intake capacity far exceeds analysis capacity.

• Review or approval steps take longer than expected.

• Certain tasks — such as issuing decisions, approvals, or client communications — are completed in minutes, but wait in queues for days.

These disparities expose bottlenecks, where one slow phase restricts the throughput of the entire process. Even if every other step has spare capacity, the bottleneck becomes the system’s true limit. This is the core of Lean thinking: you cannot improve what you cannot see — and BPM gives you visibility.

Step 3: Turning Data Into Decisions

With time-based performance data, leadership gains the ability to make fact-based decisions around:

• Service Standards: What’s realistically achievable per month with existing capacity.

• Resourcing: Whether to add staff, cross-train, or rebalance workloads.

• Automation Opportunities: Which activities create high-value versus repetitive manual effort.

• Process Improvement Priorities: Which bottlenecks, if optimized, yield the highest overall efficiency gains.

For instance, in one analysis, a team’s monthly working time was 7,200 minutes per resource, but total end-to-end flow time per case was 4,700 minutes. With two and a half full-time resources, this translated to only five completed cases per month — a clear sign of overutilization and the need to redefine service levels.

That kind of clarity replaces assumption with accountability.

Step 4: Seeing the Bigger Picture — Capacity and Control

A time study doesn’t just reveal how long things take. It tells the story of process health:

• Flow Time = how long a process takes end-to-end.

• Capacity = how much the process can produce in a given time.

• Utilization = how much of the team’s time is consumed meeting current demand.

When utilization consistently exceeds 100%, the process isn’t sustainable — staff burn out, delays compound, and quality declines. By contrast, when capacity and demand are balanced, organizations can commit to realistic service standards and drive continuous improvement.

The Business Case for Business Process Management

The power of BPM lies in its precision. It translates workflow conversations into quantitative insights that leaders can act on. Organizations that invest in time-based process measurement gain more than efficiency — they gain control over their operations, confidence in their service commitments, and clarity on where to focus transformation efforts next. As I often tell clients, you can’t manage what you don’t measure — and in business process management, time is your most valuable metric.

Brian Sebastian

Lean Six Sigma Black Belt | Business Process Architect | Organizational Change Strategist