Sarah had a problem.
She was responsible for improving the onboarding process at her company. She had a rough idea of where things felt slow, but there were dozens of steps, handoffs, and approvals involved. Guessing was not going to cut it.
So, like any good analyst, she built a model of her process and ran a simulation in ProcessModel. The simulation showed her exactly how the process behaved, but it left her with one big question still open: where should I start?
That is when she clicked the Hot Spot Evaluator.
In seconds, the tool scanned the entire process and highlighted the ten areas with 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 that step took only 5 minutes, yet it showed up in red with a high impact score. It turned out that tiny step was a common bottleneck for every applicant, and not because of how long it took. The real problem was when it happened, the time between the times. Background checks were only submitted and reported on Thursday at three PM. Because Sarah had captured when each activity actually occurred while building the model, the Hot Spot Evaluator could expose how much that timing was costing.
Sarah focused her team’s energy there first. With one change, automating that step, she cut total onboarding time by 44%. So how did she pull off the change in 15 minutes? Two adjustments did it. First, every outgoing background check would be submitted to the contractor as soon as it arrived in HR, roughly six per day, instead of waiting for the Thursday batch. Second, the background check contractor already offered a built-in option to send completed results straight to the requestor and additional recipients by email. The requesting department no longer had to wait for HR to check for completed reports, and now received notification within minutes of completion. Sarah noted that the changes sound simple, yet the problem had been invisible for more than four years.
Later, presenting her results to the executive team, she backed them up with the full Impact Analysis report, showing how value-added and non-value-added work shaped the process. Imagine the reaction in the room when management realized they could cut onboarding time by 44%, do it at no cost, benefit more than 1,200 new employees each year, and have it take effect immediately.
But it all started with a single question: where should I begin?
And the Hot Spot Evaluator gave her the answer in seconds. If you want to see where your own process is quietly losing time, explore how bottleneck analysis works or take ProcessModel for a spin.
